To kill the moonlight
by RonCN
Summary: Rhyl'lyn has defied the bane that shut his kin from the World for three long ages, but escaping his confinement is only the first step: he must face a reality that he never knew, but that was forever changed after the War even as he struggles for revenge.
1. To catch the moonlight

A/N: _Welcome to my newest tale: I have enjoyed the writing, and I hope you'll like the result just as much. The whole thing was born after I wrote a Forgotten Realms one-shot which a lot of people wanted to see continued... I obliged, but as the story progressed it shaped up more and more into something different: into this world, which is a unique take on fantasy created through traditional Dungeons and Dragons experience. Why don't you give it a chance? Read and let me know what your thoughts!_

o O o

**1. To catch the moonlight**

o O o**  
><strong>

Rhyl'lyn leaned against the rocky wall, fighting off the wariness that tried to take over his body. He closed his eyes and took deep, calming breaths, desperately trying to slow down the frantic beating of his heart before the maddening pounding forced him to pass out.

He hadn't made it this far to fail now, when he could smell the proximity of the surface in the very air.

The young fey didn't even know how he could tell that the humid smell that had been permeating the dry atmosphere of the Otherworld for the last few hundred yards actually belonged to the World, because he had never been there before, but know it he did.

He just had to push a bit further, and he would be there.

Rhyl'lyn forced his abused body to ignore the pain that had followed him all the way from his rushed escape from his homeland and to just move, his mind refusing to acknowledge that he was feeling weaker and weaker.

He half walked, half stumbled past a sharp turn of the tunnel he had been following, and was greeted by a soft, invisible caress to his sweaty visage.

He had felt something like that before, only not quite.

Usually, the fingers stretching out to him were warm, as dry as the air surrounding him, and more often than not they were heralding danger. This time, though, there was a soothing coolness to the gentle touch, a hint of purity as the intangible hands swept his soaked bangs back from his forehead.

He had read about this, and so his body relaxed slightly and a faint smile of relief pulled at his lips.

This must be what they called a soft, fresh breeze - a current of moving air that was untainted by the sulfurous fumes it always carried in the Lands Beyond the Land.

It was the final signal meaning that he was facing the last leg of his journey.

Once he covered the last few yards, he would be free of the Otherworld.

Rhyl'lyn could barely believe that he had managed to come so far: when he had set off, alone and wounded and with only a faint idea of the route that laid ahead, he had been sure that he would wind up dead before he could finally set his gaze on the rightful land of all fey.

And yet, here he was.

His merry thoughts were interrupted by a faint odor, though, snapping his mind out of the complacent reverie he had foolishly allowed himself. His nose informed him of the existence of living waste and of decaying flesh, somewhere in the cave were this tunnel ended and the World began. It was a smell he was familiar with, too, having lived in a place where the dead bodies of those who were no longer of use served as compost for phosphorescent, hallucinogen mushrooms.

So he had reached his goal, but he was far from safe yet.

Rhyl'lyn strained his ears as he let his eyes travel down the length of his right arm to examine his hand.

It was wrapped tight in bandages that had become dirty along the way, and he still couldn't move his fingers without the searing pain lancing through his mind and threatening to leave him incapacitated. Due to the magic nature of the terrible lesion he would sport for life, it was unlikely that he had gained an infection, but he wouldn't be able to use the hand in a fight.

He was too close to defenseless for comfort, and so he allowed himself a weary sigh of relief when he ascertained that there was no noise to be heard. Whatever inhabited this particular entrance to the Otherworld, it was not around at the time.

This was an arrangement liable to change without so much as a moment's notice, so Rhyl'lyn decided to take his chances in the World before he was backed into a situation he knew he couldn't win.

Unfortunately, that was easier said that done. No amount of books or doctrine received in his earlier years could have prepared the young male for the unforgiving surface.

Some things he could manage. For example, as he crawled to the mouth of the cavern, his fingers felt the grainy, slippery texture that apparently covered the base of this world - and he promptly filed it away as the so-called soil while small branches and fallen leaves crunched under his light steps.

He took one such sample of vegetation between his fingers, unable to help his curiosity and wishing to keep his mind occupied to avoid dwelling on the huge step he was taking.

It was dry, and fragile, and it shattered with the barest pressure from his fingertips.

It was quite similar to an ornamental mushroom, he thought with a smirk, or it would be if it was sturdier.

He had had the chance to read a couple of studies about plants and botanic knowledge of old during his training, and he honestly didn't understand what the fascination was all about: they were just like fungus, and he was quite sure that no matter how impressive they could be, the World would always pale in comparison to the wonders of the Otherworld.

And at that point, Rhyl'lyn chose to lift his gaze from the floor to take in his first impression of the lands he had so striven to reach.

His eyes, still a glowing orange-red even though they had been switched out of the lightless vision, landed upon the irregular trunk of a tree.

It wasn't particularly old, nor particularly tall or magnificent, but Rhyl'lyn's eyes ran up and up, nailed to the moss-covered plant.

And then, his eyes went even higher, slowly taking in the evergreen canopy that sunk itself into a sea of endless black, reaching out and getting entwined with the upper branches of another colossus, and another, and another, and another…

A spell of dizziness came over the dokkar, and he was forced to his knees, his eyes clenched shut as he tried not to heave.

The air itself, the soft breeze he had felt before and that had picked up some, slowly eased him off the wave of vertigo, blowing gently into his face, through his pale hair and down his bent neck as he got a grip on himself.

Little by little, his shoulders stopped shaking and his tense muscles relaxed. Rhyl'lyn let his body get the comfort it needed for a few heartbeats, and then he opened his eyes again.

Bracing himself, he lifted his gaze once more.

Above him, there was an endless vacuum of swirling darkness. There was not an end to it, and he could not measure the vast distances between himself and the vertiginous top of the world.

So that was the sky, he thought.

He understood now what the tales and ancient songs meant: it truly was impossible to describe, as it was impossible to measure. No matter how many words he tried to use, he could not convey the humbling sensation of openness and vulnerability created by that heavenly vault.

Still, Rhyl'lyn frowned.

There… was… something missing?

Surely, the darkness up there wasn't supposed to be so… complete.

A spear of the purest white light lashed out and trashed across the heavens, and the distinctive smell of burnt ozone reached the dokkar's nose.

The light felt like a red-hot poker to the sensitive fey pupils and Rhyl'lyn cried out in pain, desperately reaching out to cover his eyes with his uninjured hand.

It had been an agonizing scream, but no one ever heard it - it was muffled out by the rolling sound of what felt like a whole cavern collapsing.

Fear seized the dokkar as he imagined that the huge sky was suddenly falling on top of his head - his punishment for escaping the Otherworld and stepping into a world that had long ago banished his kin.

However, his quick mind, boosted by dread and adrenaline, quickly chased those thoughts off: he had seen that white streak of light before: it was lightning.

A deadly spell that burned the flesh by virtue of nothing but the air itself, without fire, without smoke… only the destruction was left.

Which meant that either he had been followed by zealots and caught up with, or his trespassing had been noticed by the servants of the Gods of the World and they were chasing him.

Neither scenario was good.

The spell had failed to hit him once, but surely it would not be wasted a second time.

Struggling to regain his feet, blinded and quite badly hurt, he just pressed forwards, moving as fast as his body allowed him to; he knew it was not a smart thing, to stomp his way without seeing where he was putting his own feet and possibly going towards his enemy, but he just couldn't sit still waiting to be hit.

Rhyl'lyn crashed through the bushes, the lower branches of the trees hitting his face like added foes and catching onto his tattered tunic, like gnarled fingers trying to hold him steady.

He lashed back at the attacking vegetation, not knowing if whoever was behind him was commanding the wildlife to turn on him as well and not having the time to pause and ponder over it.

His mind was void of anything but the need to keep on running, to survive…

A second streak of lightning shone against his watery eyes, plunging his world of blotches and dancing lights into solid blackness yet again. The same rumble he had felt before was repeated, so loud that it seemed to rock the earth itself.

Rhyl'lyn's breath hitched, and his usually nimble feet lost purchase as he fell to the humid soil.

Instinctively, he tried to break his fall and an agony like he'd never known before soared through his body and coursed his veins as his whole weight collapsed upon his right, mangled hand.

He felt bile rising in his throat as his mind tried to keep at bay the fog of unconsciousness; he shook in spasms of pain while his eyes blinked tears madly away.

Then, he felt it.

It hit his forehead, his cheeks, his neck, his unprotected chest.

Rhyl'lyn tensed and braced himself.

Only, the corroding pain of acid eating away his flesh never came.

The droplets were cold and felt inexplicably good against his grit-covered skin, slowly tracing wet paths upon his prone form as more and more drops continued to fall on him.

The dokkar forced all his mental discipline in place to rein in the hysteric fear that had seized him, and realization dawned on his mind.

It was… water.

He didn't understand. Why was he being soaked in water? Were they planning to erode him away? To drown him?

Yet the dripping of the liquid element, though constant, was much too soft to be an effective way to cause him any pain; and while it was true that it felt like a great quantity of it was falling on him, flooding the forest where he had turned up did seem a bit of a far-fetched way to kill him.

He blinked furiously, trying desperately to regain his vision, his body still taut and strung in adrenaline as he kept waiting for the worst to happen.

Then, acting on a rather daring impulse, Rhyl'lyn poked his tongue out, catching one of the many droplets that ran in steady rivulets down his face. It tasted fresh, and pure, and so clean that it actually took him a few moments to understand that this was what water was actually supposed to be like - not the tangy, acrid liquid he had drank before in his home.

It made even less sense to him. He was not being poisoned either. Water was a rare resource, a form of richness on its own right in a world where it was found in rare spots that stood far between; where it was even rarer for the liquid bodies discovered to be drinkable and not harmful in nature - in the Otherworld, it was too easy for the precious water to mix with and carry traces of acid, sulfur, even quicksilver and the occasional putrid corpse that would spoil whole fountains.

He was, literally, being bathed in translucent gold.

Slowly, so painfully slowly, his eyes were able to distinguish shapes and shadows within the shadows, and with a straining effort he was able to recognize the trees around him, the rocks that littered the uneven floor he was lying in, the branches that had chased him and the shapes of the leaves, quivering in the wind as if they sympathized with the tremors shaking is own body.

Rhyl'lyn looked around, trying to find whoever was behind the strange circumstances. However, he came up with nothing - he seemed to be alone.

Craning his neck while trying to ease his weight off his right arm, his eyes widened in utter shock as the most amazing sight he had ever encountered presented itself.

The black void of the sky was alight with deep blues and shining purples, rolling and spiraling in a show of nature's prowess. The water droplets, reflecting the spectacular illumination like molten streaks of silver, poured down from that endless sky, kissing and embracing the land and cleaning him of the rigors of his journey.

A mix between a ragged sob and a relieved cackle tore itself from his throat, and he settled down in the floor to bask in the welcoming gift the surface was giving him, relaxing and letting the water wash away his fear and his pain.

It was raining for him, and he planned to enjoy it for as long as the skies would let him.

And when the storm let up, nearly two hours later, Rhyl'lyn was smiling and feeling completely at ease - his mind was calm like a mirror, much calmer than he had ever managed to get it while meditating back in the Otherworld.

He was soaked, and the rain water was not only cold, but had turned his surroundings into sticky mud, and yet he felt renewed. His tiredness had ebbed away, the cool had soothed his aching muscles, and he was more alive than ever.

Somewhere along the downpour, he had reclined against a rock that would grant him a good view of the sky, and now, as the heavy clouds started to part and to dissolve into the ether, he didn't move.

He waited.

He waited, for he knew that he was about to face the one thing he had been following, the elusive quarry of his fool's quest that had, somehow, ended up happily for him.

The raging darkness gave way to a more velvety black, far over his head, and hundreds - thousands of small glittering lights covered the celestial vault like diamond dust. The wind picked up some, taking away the last lingering clouds, and then…

Then he saw it.

Round, and shiny, white as his own hair, so close and yet so far, far away.

So that was the moon.

The sight of the symbol that stood for everything the dokkar had once believed in, for the beginning of it all and ultimately for their suffering, was so beautiful that it forced the air out of his lungs, and he could do nothing but marvel for the longest minutes.

As if ensnared by an spell, Rhyl'lyn reached up with his right hand and held it in front of the celestial orb that held so much meaning to him, to his whole condemned race. Slowly, carefully, he started tugging the dirty, ragged bandages free - it hurt, but somehow his spirit was far beyond the pain as he uncovered his marked hand.

Finally, the bandages fell across his lap and his hand stood there, bathed by the creamy moonlight, reaching out in front of his eyes as if to touch a reality that only he could grasp on.

He tried moving his fingers, turning his forearm this way and that, and a quiet, truly happy smile appeared on his lips as he watched his muscles and tendons tense and relax under the blackened skin that covered his right hand, from over his wrist to the tips of his fingers.

It had been magically wounded, pigmented and scarred over, time and again, until the normal coloration of his ebony skin became a uniform pitch black, as if it was permanently coated in tar. In the Otherworld it would be difficult to notice, and even here, in the World, those who were no used to seeing a dokkar's skin would have a hard time understanding the agonizing procedure that Rhyl'lyn had endured - perceiving its results.

For him, though, his hand offered a stark contrast under the pale night light. It was a mark he would always carry, and he would never see it as clearly as now, under the stars.

He curled his fingers, closing them in a tight fist.

He closed his eyes and allowed his smile to fade into a sneer.

He had made it, he had survived the Otherworld. Now, he was ready to live up to his name.

Rhyl'lyn. Killer of the moon


	2. Dreams of change

A/N: _Hello again: here it is, the next chapter. After the intriguing start, the pace slows some to catch its breath before everything picks up again. I hope you'll like it! Also, special thanks to everyone who's showing an interest in this story._

o O o

**2. Dreams of change**

o O o**  
><strong>

Khalia didn't hate the Brookmoor, though she didn't love it either. She had been born to the humid air and fetid stale water, to the invading greenery and the ungrateful soil, and that was it: she had learned to accept the land since her earliest childhood, because there was nothing she could do to change it. No matter the tears, the whines or the screams: the swamp would forever be a back corner of the civilised world.

Exactly the same thing happened with her distant neighbours: the people inhabiting Reed Shallows would wake up in the morning, labor for hours under an unforgiving sun to pry some meager cereal from the land or a diminutive fish or two from the river, and would go back home. They would enjoy a few free hours when the time of the year allowed for a less strict working of the fields or when the spring waters turned the river into a rabid white monster, and they would spend those precious free hours talking about the next harvest, about the next evening spent on the riverbanks waiting for the fish to chomp down on the bait. And it would make Khalia sick, but she would not be able to change them.

She had given up trying.

However, she had not given up dreaming. Perhaps she was stuck in the Brookmoor until she died of old age, but she refused to let the Brookmoor be a frontier for her mind. She listened to the old tales and songs and remembered them - she imagined the places and people who appeared in those stories, and they became colorful and real in her imagination. She was determined to know what hid beyond the river, beyond the swamp. And thus, she was weird.

Weird not only because she lived alone in a cottage half a mile away from the hamlet, weird not only because she did not plow the land nor herded sheep nor goat, weird not only because she was the daughter of a dead trapper who had never really blended in, but because she loved to listen. When she had free time, she used to sit with the elders and listen to their senseless ramblings: to the latest gossip, to the best way to cook your chicken, to how to make your own tools, to the one time a foreigner had ridden through Reed Shallows… And also to the descriptions of the secret plants which grew deep in the swamp and to their healing properties, and to the legends about the Gods and how they had made the World and all the creatures in it, and to the stories of times past when the people of the plains lived better thanks to the Bogmen.

Khalia didn't know about the people of the plains, but she did live better thanks to the Bogmen. Her father had dealt with them because it was impossible to enter their territory, the swamp that was the heart of the region, without encountering them: short, lithe men and women who employed their traditional skills to survive where most other creatures would be killed. They could hunt any beast and could find any plant in their land, they could hide like ghosts and move silently like the wind. They made their clothing out of vegetal material and used mud and soil to mask their bodies and their smell: they were one with the Brookmoor, and had been for many generations.

It had been long enough for them to become different in their customs, in their talk and in their look, and now they were alone: the people of the plains, like the villagers of Reed Shallows, avoided them like the plague. It was said that they carried the smell of death with them, that they ate their own kind, that they would take away your child for they could not reproduce.

Lies, Khalia knew.

The Bogmen smelled of stale water and dead plants because they spent their day up to the waist in the stuff and used it to mask their trails. They did not eat their dead, they buried them in a particular pool of the swamp with a small but significant rite. They could have children, but the little ones never left the protection of the deepest parts of the Brookmoor, and the same thing happened with their old. They were a humble people who didn't ask for much and always honored their promises, and it was thanks to them that Khalia earned her livelihood.

The girl was the only person in Reed Shallows who dared to enter the Brookmoor and who regularly dealt with the Bogmen, so she had some advantages: she had a supply of rare plants and herbs no one else would be able to find, she knew remedies everyone else had already forgotten, she had all the information of the happenings in the swamp, and she got to be called a 'witch'. While Khalia could have done without the witch part, the truth was that the young woman was the closest thing the lost village had to a decent healer and this fact allowed her to trade for all the other things she might need, either with the villagers to sell them medicines from the swamp or with the Bogmen to sell them medicines from the plains.

The downside was that sometimes the trading took place in humid, stale and unsavory places, but then again such places were just a couple dozen yards from her backdoor.

Khalia threw a longing look over her shoulder, wishing she could just go back to her cottage to warm herself by the fire, and adjusted the cloak she wore to better protect her against the soft drizzle. She cradled a parcel against her chest and turned again to look beyond the underbrush, waiting for her contact to arrive.

And even though she had all her senses focused, she never heard them come.

"We greet you, Khalia of the plains," said the smaller figure.

"Well met, brother of the Brookmoor," she replied politely, with a deep nod.

"The rare flower you wished for and the root of the moonblood bush we bring. Have you the cut brought?"

'Cut' was the word they used for knife. Their tools were made of wood or stone, because for them it was impossible to find or produce steel, but they loved to have the sharper, more precise instruments even if they rusted quite soon. Khalia nodded and opened her parcel, showing a fine hunter's knife with a hilt made of bone and a spare, serrated blade.

"Yes, here it is. I hope it is to your liking."

"A good piece, it is," the small man took it and, after a careful inspection, nodded to the second one, who stepped forth and offered a small straw bag with two satchels made of woven lichen.

"We trade in peace" the bigger man said.

"We trade in peace, and in peace we part," answered Khalia.

"Thus we part."

The Bogmen turned to leave and Khalia waited, as courtesy demanded. But once the small man had disappeared, his companion stopped and turned around, regarding her with bright, intelligent eyes.

"New thing in Brookmoor runs free," he said. "From a hole it came, wounded, and in a hole it fell."

"What do you mean?" she asked with a frown. "Is this… a person?"

"A beast it is not."

"Someone like me, then?"

The man shrugged.

"Not like me. Not like us. Moving in the swamp, it can't. It will die, soon."

Khalia bit her lip. Sometimes the Bogmen spoke in what seemed to be riddles, since they cared little for anything that didn't belong with them, but she thought she had understood well enough: someone was wounded and lost in that bloody swamp, and although the Bogmen would not kill another person, they would not help an outsider either.

Of course, that didn't mean that the poor soul would survive long: the Brookmoor was a dangerous place, more dangerous for those who didn't know the terrain well enough and most perilous for someone lost, wounded, and surely disoriented.

She could not sit back and forget. Securing the bag to her belt with a decisive nod to herself, she asked:

"In which direction did you see this thing?"

o O o

The rain and drizzle had made good work of the trails, but Khalia was experienced. Perhaps she could not compete against the Bogmen and their skills but she was probably the next person best suited to the wild of the Brookmoor, so she didn't falter: following the vague directions given to her and using her own eyes, she managed to find faint clues to point her in the right direction. It wasn't much, just a broken twig, an upturned pebble, a shallow water-filled depression where a body had lain…

The girl took a deep breath while she studied the terrain, a light frown marring her features: she had not been able to find the hole the 'thing' had come from, but it looked like she had found the place where it had spent the night. From that point onwards the markings upon the soil and through the underbrush were more evident, as if the body who made them had been too exhausted to keep on walking and had moved by dragging itself forward. Besides, the new trail started at some point after the previous' night storm had died out, which meant that she was close.

Khalia moved on, a new worry settling upon her. She hoped that whoever was ahead would be alright, but she also started to think about who it would be. No one from Reed Shallows, of course, and strangers were difficult to come by in the Brookmoor so, who could it be? Why would they be there, wounded and careless? Because it took a careless someone to keep moving in such poor conditions and not even attempt to tend to their injuries.

And that was yet another mystery, wasn't it? She could see that the person she followed was not healthy, and the Bogmen had said that it was wounded, but she had seen not a single trace of blood or anything to suggest an injury. Had this unknown person been injured already when they had entered the swamp? If so, who could be mad enough to enter, knowing that wounds would fester and fevers would rise?

She entertained a lot of theories, but not a single one of them prepared her for the sight that greeted her when she caught up with her quarry.

At first, there were just a few broken branches and a hint of bent underbrush. Khalia held her breath unconsciously and crept forwards, half fearing she would discover a corpse. She swept the greenery aside with a hand, the other ready by the hilt of her own hunting knife, and immediately noticed that she was in time: she saw a leg, and then a hip, and finally the back of a body, all covered in tattered and muddled gray fabric and shivering violently.

"Damn it all," she cursed in a soft voice, releasing her knife and taking hold of the prostrated figure's shoulder. "Hang in there, my friend. I'm going to help you, but you can't die on me now!"

The young man, for it was clearly the short, lanky figure of a male teenager, didn't answer. He was already unconscious and Khalia turned him on his back, noting with alarm how cold he was to the touch.

Then, she froze.

It was not a youth.

The bones under her hand were light and frail and his very adult face was sharp and proud with high cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes clenched tight in his pain. His dusky skin was dirty with mud, but the swamp could not hide its tone, as it could not hide the creamy pallor of his hair.

She gasped and stared at the human-like creature.

She wasn't sure but she thought she had heard tales about the likes of him. The girl never would have dreamed to see one, though… Could it be?

"A fey…" she whispered, reaching out to brush the crusted strands of hair out of the closed eyes.

The body convulsed and the spasm broke her out of her trance. He didn't look like her, but he was dying. It didn't matter that he was the stuff mothers used to scare their children into obedience: after all, Bogmen were similarly feared and disliked, and there was nothing wrong with the people of the Brookmoor. Besides, all there was left of the fey were legends and old midwives tales, so perhaps she was wrong in her assumption. Perhaps it was just a normal man from a faraway land who had been wounded and gotten lost for perfectly normal and appropriate reasons. Perhaps he was just underdeveloped and it made him look childlike, and perhaps…

The wounded man groaned and Khalia wished she could hit herself: she could waste no more time.

Making sure her bag was well attached to her hip, she slid one arm around the man's torso, grabbed onto his wrist with the other hand, and hauled him up.

The two of them were about to end up flat on their backs. The stranger didn't only look frail and childish: he was light, so much so that Khalia overbalanced when the weight she expected to lift turned out to be nonexistent.

However, that was about the only feature of youth he had, as the girl noted when she adjusted his body and started to trample her way back to her cottage. The body resting against her was long of limb, with flat and powerful muscles clenched in his delirium.

She only hoped that possible differences between them were not fundamental. She could see clearly that the man was badly ill, but she could see no wound. If he suffered from some kind of intangible affliction, she was not sure she would be able to help him.

And Khalia wanted to help him, oh so badly.

If it truly was a fey, she would see something no one else had for generations.

If it truly was a fey, her wildest dreams about abandoning her dreary life in the Brookmoor could come true.

If it truly were a fey…

o O o

The walk back home had never seemed so long to the young woman. She had half carried and half dragged the fey along with her for what felt like an eternity, stopping every few steps to listen to his breathing, wondering whether it had become more shallow or whether the fever had risen. Khalia was tired enough to collapse by the time she could see her cottage beyond the swamp border, but she didn't allow herself to take a rest. The sun was close to falling already and she had taken much too long to return home.

When she pushed open the rough wooden door and stumbled inside with her precious cargo it was already dark inside, but she moved with ease, as if she could see: her house was small and had little in the way of luxuries, and she knew it as the back of her own hand. The bed was one step in and two steps to the left, and she let the man fall on top of the coverlets as soon as she could.

Damn, his skin was clammy and hot.

Khalia rushed to the stone hearth that dominated the small cabin's interior, retrieved an ember from its copper holder, placed it upon a misshapen mound of twigs and blew on it to ignite a fire. When the orange flames danced merrily and started to warm the air of her cottage, she placed an old cauldron on a hanger over the fire and rushed to fill it with water - she would need it, either to treat the man or to feed him. Taking a deep breath, she grabbed a stub of wax, lighted it and moved it to the bedside.

"Right," she said, as if to gather her own thoughts and courage. "Let's see what's wrong with you, my friend."

The first thing she did was prodding his head and neck: she knew that some of the worst wounds were invisible ones obtained in such places, but it looked like everything was right. True, his forehead was grazed and the blood had dripped into his eye, his cheekbone was slightly swollen as if it had been hit and there was not an inch of him without signs of having weathered the night in the wilds, but none of the marks seemed to be life-threatening.

That was good. If the head was alright, and if the belly was alright, he would pull through.

Belly wounds were just a slow death: could not be healed, could not be helped. They translated into a long agony with a certain end. The stranger's clothes were not bloodstained - just mud stained - so she dared to hope, but she had to check anyway. She started to take off his shirt, despaired of figuring out the torn laces, and cut the front. When she peeled it apart, she let out the breath she had been holding. No swellings out of place, no putrid smell, nothing. Just smooth, dark skin pearled with sweat.

She strictly forbid herself from looking too closely at the well defined chest and stomach - and she had thought his body childish, hadn't she? - and checked over his ribs: though it seemed that his breathing was not impeded, she didn't want to be overconfident. Meticulously, she moved to his shoulders, arms and…

"Oh Gods," she gasped. "What's this?"

Khalia held his right hand between her own. It was burning hot and sticky, as a festering wound covered in blood, yet when she examined it closely no lacerations were visible. It didn't mean that everything was fine, though, because the fey groaned loudly even in his unconscious state when she touched and moved his hand.

She ground her teeth in determination.

"I've never seen something like this, but I'll help you. Don't worry, we'll figure it out," she said.

And she believed it. Even though she knew not what had caused the condition or how to remedy it, the thought of loosing the fey was simply unacceptable.

So she stood up, poured some water from the cauldron into a bowl, grabbed a clean cloth and started to clean the her patient. She must get the noxious humours out of him, purify him and let him sweat his fever again. The sooner all remnants of the Brookmoor were out of his skin the better.

Then, she would apply a calming balm to his chest, to help him breath easier, and a paste of roots to his cuts and grazes to stop the bleeding and hurry up the scarring process. Afterwards, she would bathe his hand on cold water and wrap it in a compress to dull the pain.

That should get them through the night, and she was already thinking of what she might need to acquire in the morning.

"It's going to be fine," she whispered, rubbing the wet bathing cloth down his tense neck.

o O o

Iladruel woke up with a start and a scream firmly lodged in the back of her throat.

Above her, the pale rays of moonlight spilling through the window painted the ceiling of her room in tones of gray and blue and the calming notes of the wind whistling among the leaves relaxed her.

It had been a dream.

Just a dream?

No, she could not fool herself so.

Sometimes the Gods saw fit imparting their messages to their faithful in their sleep, and Iladruel had learned long ago to tell those prophetic dreams apart from the mundane ones. Tonight had been important, she could tell from how vivid and urgent it had felt.

The fey stood up from her bed and leaned out the window, staring at the stars beyond the outstretched fingers of the trees and trying, trying to recall. It was like attempting to hold water in your cupped hands: the images bled and blended into one another, and slowly it went away, lost for ever.

There was fear and suffering and anguish, and there was darkness. There was also hope, shining like a silver ray of moonlight. There was… a pressing need to run, to escape, pursuing the light, and then everything was white. Closed eyes, dark of lid and pale of lash, and the dream faded leaving behind the smell of rain.

A dokkar, then.

"A dark fey has left the Otherworld," Iladruel said to the night, wrapping her arms about herself.

The news wasn't as joyous as it might seem and the fey dreamer shivered, cold and worried.

Her dark cousins had been banished to dwell far beyond the surface of the World as divine punishment after a gruesome war which split the Kin and put an end to an age of promise that would never come back. The natural order of things dictated that the dokkar remained away from the lands of the sun evermore, and yet her dream had not been filled with the vindictive rage of a god demanding that their law be upheld. It had been scared and daring and it had compelled her to wish with all her heart that the dark fey managed to leave the Otherworld behind.

It must be a signal.

Perhaps the gods had planned for this. Perhaps it was time of change.

Iladruel closed the window and started to dress. It was late but she needed to be somewhere else. She needed to talk to someone about her dream and figure out what it asked her to do.

And she knew just the right door to knock on.


	3. Mirages from the past

A/N: _Next update: I hope you will like it. Read, enjoy, and leave a review if you do._

o O o

**3. Mirages from the past**

o O o**  
><strong>

Pale sun rays filtered through velvety gray clouds and found Khalia knocking on the door of a small house in Reed Shallows. The residence was almost in shambles and only an old, scrawny, grumpy woman lived therein, and it was a place generally avoided by all villagers. Villagers also tended to avoid her, and the young woman took a moment to dwell on the sweet irony of life that seemed to throw outcasts together.

She would not be an outcast forever, though. As a matter of fact, it wouldn't be for much longer. She intended to heal the fey and then she would leave the handful of houses which called themselves Reed Shallows far, far behind her. How could it be otherwise? She had found a fey, a being who existed only in legends. She had touched him, felt his pulse and the warmth of his skin, and it had been real. Even though they said that fey had all died in a bloody war when time was young, or that they had retreated from the world, or that they had been punished and jailed somewhere by the gods, it had been _real _and portentous. She knew it must mean something.

Right, she thought, shaking her head and squaring her shoulders. She had better get moving, for the first step to the rest of her life involved making sure that the fey survived.

Khalia pushed the door open, just a crack, and called out,

"Grandma Ulra?"

"Do come in, child," a thin voice answered from the darkness. "Who might it be paying a visit today?"

Khalia slipped in and let the door fall closed behind her. She had to blink several times for her eyes to grow accustomed to the dim light, and in the meantime she heard a low chuckle.

"My, my, if it is not the woman of the bogs."

Finally discerning the shape of the old, frail woman sitting on a rickety chair against the far wall, Khalia nodded. She had long ago grown used to the moniker and it bothered her no more. Townsfolk whispered it constantly behind her back: they called her worse things, too. It came together with living alone and retired from Reed Shallows, together with dealing with Bogmen, together with spending her days searching for rare herbs on the Brookmoor, together with knowing how to use those herbs.

It was amusing to see how their behaviour changed when they needed her to apply that very knowledge to heal their ailments.

Just as she needed Grandma Ulra now.

"I need your help," she said, moving towards her.

"Of course you do," the old woman chuckled again. "You would not be here otherwise."

Khalia didn't correct her. It was true, after all.

"Grandma, you are wise and remember a lot of things. I would ask you to remember about the fey folk."

"Flattery shan't take your far with me, child. Aye, I remember what others have forgotten. Betimes it is best that it remains forgotten. Why would you come to ask such a thing, I wonder?"

"Why is it better that it remains forgotten?" Khalia countered, avoiding the question.

"For it serves naught. Just to fill a head like yours full of birds. The fey are long gone, girl."

"What if they weren't?"

The small, hunched figure of Grandma Ulra leaned in and her pale blue eyes caught a shaft of light filtering through the window. For a moment, her weak vision seemed to be sharp as a hawk's, staring deep into, no, right through Khalia.

"What do you hide, little one? Have you found what was lost? Do you believe it so?"

Khalia startled and took a step backwards. She hadn't prepared for this. It had been foolish of her, not to expect questions, but foolish she had been.

"I hide nothing, Grandma," she stammered and floundered for an appropriate response. "It is just… you know how I like to hear the stories…"

It was true. For years, when she had been but a child and her father had been alive, she would spend her eves in Reed Shallows, pestering whoever she found to tell her, to teach her. She had visited Ulra often back then, too, until she had learned all she thought useful at the time.

Grandma Ulra's eyes gleamed as she shagged back in her chair, a dry cackle spilling past her lips.

"Do you _need _me to tell you about the fey to _help _you pass the time, then?"

"No, of course not!" another mistake, the words she had thoughtlessly uttered to begin the conversation, and such a silly one. It seemed she did nothing right. "I…" she started to explain, and then realized that she could explain nothing short of the truth. And the truth was hers, and hers alone.

"Secrets are a powerful thing, child," Grandma Ulra said in her low, raspy voice. "That is something you do not quite grasp, or you would not come here asking for my secrets with lies on your tongue."

"Knowledge should be freely shared. It is meant to be spread," Khalia replied curtly. She hated to be called a liar.

"Oh? You reckon so? By all means, then, do share," Ulra smiled, deceptively sweet.

"That is prying, not knowing."

"It is a fine line there, child. Who draws it, I wonder? You? Do you know what matters and what doesn't? What should interest me?"

"Why should my life interest you?"

"Because I am here, and I am alone, and I have naught better to do all morn," the old woman laughed and Khalia knew she had lost. She would learn nothing and she was losing precious time.

Turning on her heel, the young woman reached the exit in two brisk strides without giving a reply. Her hand was already opening the door when Ulra's voice stopped her, all merriment gone from her tone.

"And because I must remember."

Khalia looked back over her shoulder and saw the old woman, glinting eyes fixed upon her and bony hands clutching the arms of her chair. She waited in silence, frozen, hovering by the door.

"The fey are bright and terrible, pitch black and wiser than any of us. They fey are makers, destroyers. The fey are like us, the fey are like the gods. The fey were here, the fey are here, the fey are gone, the fey shall come. The choice must be wise, except that it is already made. Go, child. Go back to your fey tales and pray, for I fear you are mistaken and dread you are right."

The girl bolted out of the ruined house, not needing to be told twice. She should not have gone to see her. They said she was crazy, they whispered she was different, and now Khalia feared they were correct. The echo of Ulra's whispers in her dark hut made Khalia shiver in spite of the sun, which was high on the sky and fighting valiantly to tear past the remnants of the clouds.

She had taken longer than expected. She should hurry back home.

Just one more stop, she told herself. And she would be quick about it.

Khalia weaved her way through the littered houses towards the riverside, looking for a head of dishevelled black hair. There it was! She approached the kid, a ten-year-old fisherman's son who was too young to be out at work. He usually stayed home, mending the nets and caring for whatever few poultry the family had, and Khalia liked doing business with him, for he was honest and innocent and did not understand why the grownups looked like that at the woman who brought medicine for his Ma.

This time, though, things were not as usual.

Beside the boy who worked his deft fingers through the fishing net sat his father, a long gutting knife and a whetting stone in hand.

"A good day to you," the man greeted her gruffly while the son awarded her a brilliant smile.

"Good day," she replied. "How do you fare? It is a surprise to find you inland."

"Aye, it is. It was a surprise for me, too. But I thought I had better stay home and make ready. The lads would not work today, in any case, and going out alone would be a waste."

Khalia frowned.

"Make ready? Whatever for?"

"Not too sure, myself," the man shrugged his wide shoulders, stopped working his blade and scratched his head. "Talked with some folks upriver yesterday and they reckon trouble's brewing."

It was quite common for fishers to stop and exchange news when they crossed paths sailing the Astror river, but trouble didn't usually brew in their lands.

"Did they have news from Seafair?" she asked, handing a small parcel of herbs to the kid and watching him run off to fetch her supplies.

"So they said. Foreign banners have been seen, they said."

Seafair was the only city close by, so it made sense that any news came from over there. However, the news was not very precise: the townsfolk, more so in rural areas such as these, might mean anything by 'foreign': from an incursion from beyond the borders to a visit from the Earl to whom Seafair was pledged. For all they knew, the colors could belong to the King himself.

"A day docked for such a rumor is unexpected coming from you," she said at length.

"Too much movement upriver means blood will flow down sooner or later, girl. That's what my father used to say."

"It cannot hurt to expect the worst, in any case," Khalia said, taking a bag from the son and hefting it on her shoulder. "Let us just hope that nothing comes to pass."

The man waved in a goodbye gesture and Khalia started off towards her cottage. The news could mean whatever their meant: she had more pressing concerns.

o O o

Pain. Pain and terror and a chase, a long chase after a memory of something he had never seen but that he knew. Bright light, burning light. Droplets of cool calmness. Peace, sleep. Darkness.

The scenes danced round and round in Rhyl'lyn's mind, an endless swirl that invited him to look closer. He tried to grasp the images, the feelings; he tried to remember and felt how the shards of his being slipped just a little bit further, right out of reach. Reaching out to try and reclaim them, to try and make sense, he held on to the current. A flash of pain shot up his arm and he sunk under, deep below the surface of consciousness.

Rhyl'lyn woke again, his eyes opening with a start and his whole body fighting to stand upright. His muscles gave out on him and hands appeared on his shoulders, holding him in place. His back sunk on a soft, yielding surface and the insistent alarm he had felt upon awakening abandoned his mind, leaving him tired and bone-weary. Keeping his eyes open resulted to be a tremendous effort and he blinked, slowly, conscious of every little movement, of his lashes settling against his cheekbones, of his struggling to drag his lids up again.

Dimness, closed confines, a ceiling hanging low over his head.

He was back in the Otherworld. He had never left. The trees and the precious rain had been a dream, nothing more.

But it hurt, it hurt so much. His hand. He had been branded, hadn't he? It could not be a mere figment of his imagination.

Fighting himself, pouring every ounce of will into the command, he lifted his right hand and squinted his eyes.

It was bandaged, the dusky skin covered in white.

He tried to reach up with his other hand, nimble fingers scrapping clumsily against the linen. He couldn't see the brand, he didn't know whether it was there, he couldn't see the brand…

If only the image would _stop_, stop flickering in and out of his vision, then he would _know_…

"No, don't do that. It'll help you."

The words drifted down to him, alien and distant. Hands entered his vision. Hands which were not his own. Fair, gentle hands held his left wrist, his right forearm. Delicate hands bid him rest and he obeyed, his gaze following the pale hands, locking on a shadow that loomed closer than the rest.

He blinked again and saw eyes, big liquid eyes staring back at him. They were dark, widely set eyes, so unlike his own. The shadow moved and then there was light, dancing orange light hurting his eyes, showing him a pale face framed by hair as dark as his homeland's eternal shadows.

Homeland. He was not there. Had he died? Had he escaped?

His parched lips attempted to form a word, his hand - his uninjured left hand - tried to reach out again, to touch this shadow. Was it even real?

He felt coolness, wetness on his lips. He sucked and part of him registered that the figure must be real, for it held a wet cloth to his mouth.

The cloth came again and again, and with it came the freshness of water, washing the fever away, removing the stupor he had fallen prey to and delivering him to an unknown world full of pain, anchored on the pale face hovering above him and on the tickle of water droplets down his throat.

"Where?" he managed to croak the word, painfully loud to his own ears, pitifully weak and frail in truth.

"You're safe, you don't need to worry. Just focus on getting better," the same voice as before answered and Rhyl'lyn wanted to cry out, for it didn't make sense.

Safe? How could he be safe? What was safety for the likes of him? His question had gone unanswered.

"Who… you?"

"My name's Khalia," the face said with a smile. "What's yours?"

"Kh… Khalia," he repeated, trying to fix the name in his foggy mind. "I… Rhyl'lyn."

"Rhyl'lyn? That's a very nice name. Sounds quite exotic, but that's because you are quite exotic yourself. It becomes you, did you know?" the voice talked and Rhyl'lyn felt his mind stretch like a rope drawn taut. Words flowed, but he could not make sense of what they said. The woman talked about him, about his name, but he could not understand what she meant. He couldn't remember why it was important to understand in the first place.

He shook his head, lost, and the woman simply smiled. It was fine. He didn't need to know. There were other things more important, other things he must remember. With an effort, he focused his tired mind and searched his head for the correct words.

"Khalia help my hand," he said.

"Yes. It is a calming balm for the pain. I do not know the injury, in fact, I have never seen the likes of it before, so I could not treat it better. I hope it will heal on its own, though. What happened to your hand?"

The barrage of words sunk into Rhyl'lyn, and surprisingly he felt grounded by the effort of listening, of making sense. Catching the meaning here and there, he frowned in concentration and then his lips curled in the ghost of a smile. He replied, and the girl looked confused.

She leaned in, as if to listen better, and he realized that he had spoken in his own tongue.

It was an old tongue, the sounds pure and clear. It was the language of the gods and no one had spoken in those tones for more than three ages. It was from the times where the World was young and the dokkar stood side by side with the fey.

It was a tongue she probably could not even _hear_.

"Mark," he said again, with effort, enunciating clearly and thinking about how little that word meant and how much his mark signified.

"Mark? Why? What of?"

Rhyl'lyn shook his head. He was tired, and it hurt, and he needed to _know_.

"Khalia help. Why?"

The woman hesitated before answering and Rhyl'lyn clung to her words, straining to listen, to understand. He was too tired.

Her meaningless words accompanied him in his descent into unconsciousness.

o O o

"Were you seeking me, m'lord?" the cloaked figure asked to the other.

Sahin watched the hummingbird fly away, startled by the sudden sound, and turned towards the voice.

"Come," he said. "We will discuss it while taking a walk. I do need it, and the gods only know when I'll see Lochhaven again."

"You sound particularly gloomy today, m'lord. Is there a particular reason?"

"Aye, there is," the older one said with a chuckle. "It is the reason I wanted to talk to you. I sincerely hope that I won't be alone in my worried thoughts by the end of this conversation."

"Then, I'm not sure it's in my best interests to continue this talk, m'lord."

The pair laughed and the sound was like silver bells ringing in the distance.

"Is it the Lady Iladruel?" asked the younger one at length, pulling back the hood of his cloak. A waterfall of the palest spun gold spilled over his shoulders and the fey ran his capable hands through his mane, trying to keep it back from his eyes.

"You know me well," Sahin replied.

"It has been many a decade."

"Idoda," the dark haired fey took a deep breath and stopped under the green canopy. "Precisely because it has been many a decade, I would hear your thoughts."

"On what, m'lord?"

"The Lady has dreamed of what may come to pass, and in her dreams she has seen dokkar."

Idoda frowned, his clear gray eyes darkening in thought.

"She had never received visions concerning our dark cousins before."

"No, and it worries me."

"But not quite so much as the _what _the dokkar were doing in these dreams, m'lord?" Idoda ventured.

Sahin nodded.

"It was just one. And he was reaching the World."

"_What_?"

"It has been more than three ages since the dream of Emain Ablach was shattered," Sahin went on, his fingers subconsciously touching the scar parting his otherwise handsome face. "More than three ages since fey turned against fey and the land was forever changed through our spilt blood."

Idoda kept silent and simply put a hand on Sahin's shoulder. He didn't remember those terrible times, he was too young and had been born in an already broken World, but his lord and friend had lived through the ordeal, had felt the blade of a brother in his flesh. It had been the first and only time the peaceful folk of the fey, dedicated to the task of making and creating, had turned against itself. The artisans became destroyers and fought valiantly, viciously, while the War of the Gods raged on.

"The Otherworld was a prison, impregnable and unreachable," the older fey continued after a pause. "A cage underneath and beyond the earth to punish the loyalty of the dokkar and to remind us that some things which are broken may never be made whole again. It was designed by the gods themselves… How has this one person escaped?"

"Do you believe they have been forgiven?"

"That is what Iladruel dares to hope."

"Iladruel. Not you."

Sahin shook his head warily.

"The gods are not a particularly forgiving race, Idoda. They tore Emain Ablach asunder to show that the unity of all fey would be no more and I see no reason for them to change their mind now."

"Split forever, those who once dwelled in peace. What kind of acts did the dokkar commit during the War, so terrible so as to be banished and forgotten?"

"They lost," Sahin replied with a bitter laugh. "They fought for those who supported them and they lost."

"Slightly harsh are the consequences to their folly, then."

"Aye. The consequences are harsh to us all, but such is the price of fighting a war that was never ours."

"But the War of the Gods was fought and won, and our dark cousins were damned in their defeat. Since this is something we cannot change, should they not remain where they belong?"

"They should. However, I can't help but agree with Iladruel on one thing: if the dokkar have managed to breach their exile and reach the World, it must mean something."

"It must mean that something is afoot, m'lord means to say."

Both men smirked ruefully and Sahin nodded.

"And it would be our duty to learn what this something may be."

"This is where you talk me into going with you, I assume," Idoda sighed.

"You would assume the right of it."

"Let's hear some more about the vision. Where are you headed?"

"That should prove to be a most interesting question," Sahin replied with a small grin.

"Oh."

"I do know that the path lies to the west, beyond Lochhaven, beyond the Astror river."

"It is not much to go by, m'lord," Idoda stared upwards, allowing his gaze to get lost in the greenery and conjuring a mental picture of the lands beyond the river.

"No, it isn't. Much less if we ignore not only where to look, but also what to look for."

"How do you plan on proceeding then, m'lord?"

Sahin took a deep breath.

"If this truly foreshadows a portent, then we will find more clues in time."

"And if it doesn't, there is certainly no harm in being cautious," Idoda finished for him.

"Aye. I will leave Lochhaven by sunrise the day after tomorrow. Will I leave alone?"

"Of course not, m'lord. Never alone."

"I would be foolish to go on your own. We will travel with you," a female chirping voice spoke high and clear, and the two fey startled from their confident stands.

There, only a handful of paces from them, stood a slim young fey with her arms crossed in front of her chest in a manner that was both stubborn and protective at once. She had spoken with confidence, but her eyes betrayed a deep worry and a steely decision.

"Lehri…" Sahin breathed softly while Idoda averted his gaze.


	4. Fear what is different

A/N: _Here it is, the next chapter. I wanted to thank everyone who has been following and supporting me with this story. I know I've done this personally with most of you, but I couldn't reply to anon. reviewer Sethis and so I'm sending this huuuuge thank you for all to see. I hope all of you will enjoy the chapter. Please, let me hear your thoughts! They matter a lot, and they improve the story!_

o O o

**4. Mirage from the past**

o O o

Rhyl'lyn opened his eyes abruptly with a sharp intake of breath and tried to remember.

Had he truly succeeded in escaping? Yes, it must be so: the walls caging him were not made of solid rock, but of rough, uneven planks which filtered pale rays of light into the small room. Wood and sun, he reminded himself.

A small smile curled up the corners of his mouth as he wallowed in the realization, but his visage turned into a frown when he heard the noise outside the house.

There was a name floating in his mind, in the vacuum that were the last hours - or had it been days? - of his life for him.

"Khalia," he remembered in a rasping whisper, letting the foreign name roll off his tongue when the door opened and the woman let herself in, surrounded by an onslaught of brilliance.

She turned her gaze to her bedridden guest, a wide smile of honest happiness in place upon seeing him awake.

"Good day to you!," she chirped, closing the door and moving closer to the fey. "I daresay you are feeling better already. You gave me such a scare, when you fell unconscious yet again and nothing I did could wake you."

The mere speed at which those words were spilled made Rhyl'lyn's head hurt, but he pushed himself to a sitting position in spite of the slight wave of nausea. He found a small measure of comfort in the fact that his right hand didn't seem to throb with red-hot pain any longer: when he brushed the bandaged fingers against his own thigh, only a dull ache remained.

"I don't think that trying to move so fast is a good idea," Khalia said, bowing to accommodate her slim pillow behind him before half helping, half pushing him back to settle against the headboard. "I would rather you didn't overwork yourself."

The fey tensed because of her closeness and her touch, but then she moved back enough to let him breathe and he had to shake his head at the new barrage of words.

"I -" he attempted to speak, forcing his words past his throat. "I understand not. Repeat?" he coughed, and although the woman frowned in confusion, she hurried to fill a wooden cup of water and bring it to his bedside.

Rhyl'lyn frowned. There it was again: the willingness to share precious, fresh water with him, the caring gestures. Why? His kin had been banished from the World for three ages now. Surely she knew he had been punished by the dokkar role in the War of the Gods. She must know that the lands under the sun were not his to walk, that he was trespassing. Did it not occur to her that perhaps his mere presence was an insult to the gods? That he sought revenge for an undeserved exile? That the terrible mark in his hand claimed his impurity?

His eyes stared mesmerized into the cup, not reaching out to grasp it nor drink it.

He mistrusted.

The woman saw his hesitation and sat uninvited by his side on the cot.

"It's alright," she said. "It's only water, I swear."

And she took a small sip, as if to prove that she was not lying, and pressed the rim to his parched lips, and for a few precious moments there was only the water dripping down his throat. How long had it been, since he had been able to drink his fill on water so pure? Had he ever done it before? He thought not, but the importance of the question disappeared while the cup lasted. Then, he licked his lips and frowned, focusing on the many matters of importance that needed to be addressed. They were half-dreamed, half-remembered queries, doubts that had arisen in his feverish mind while he was neither here nor there… and one was particularly prominent in his mind:

"Why?"

"I found you hurt in the swamp, so I picked you up and brought you to my home to nurse you back to health."

She still talked too much, too fast, even with his headache receding and his brain slowly disentangling itself from the web of drowsiness it had fallen prey to, but he managed to understand enough words to form an idea.

"You know me not," he stated, as if he could invalidate her arguments with that simple fact.

Khalia took a deep breath before answering.

"I know that you're not man," she said. "You're a fey."

She whispered the name with reverence, and Rhyl'lyn noted that she had not called him a dark fey. Was she truly ignorant? How could that be? Closing his eyes, he wondered what that might mean for him. It was true that a long time had passed since his ilk walked the World, that the lives of Man were short and their memories weak, but the truth remained that, three ages past, the very foundation of the Reign of Promise had shaken, had been sundered, torn apart in jagged pieces never to be reunited.

And it had been because of Man.

Had they forgotten?

"Yes," he rasped at length into the silence. " I fey."

If they had, he would not remind them. Not until he learned how the World had changed and could determine a better course of action. Not yet.

He turned his gaze to the shadowed form of the woman and saw her dark eyes opened wide, her hands gripping the wooden cup with a white-knuckled hold, her breath leaving her in a trembling sigh. Judging by her reaction, she had not been quite so sure of her own statement. The confirmation of his alleged origins had thrilled her, had garnered a strong reaction from her. Rhyl'lyn didn't know what that suggested, but his head was starting to spin anew with the possibilities and she took notice of it.

"You should rest now. Save your strength and heal fast."

The dokkar examined her for a moment longer, as if trying to decide whether she would betray and kill him, then he shook his head: if she wished him harm, it'd not come before she obtained whatever she needed from him. For the moment, he was safe.

"Yes," he said, his eyes sliding shut and his breath evening out. "I tire."

And he kept up the charade, listening to her and trying to understand her, until all pretence gave way to true sleep.

o O o

Hours passed as if they were minutes inside the quiet hut. The sun started its long decline on the sky and still, she didn't move.

Of course, Khalia was aware that there were many things she needed to do: the house did not tend to itself. Yet every time she so much as tried to gather her thoughts and start doing something useful, her eyes were drawn to his face.

She had known he was not like her. She had healed him counting on it. She was sure he was a fey. In spite of it all, when those words had left his mouth in that slow brogue of his, the meaning had hit her with a sense of reality she had not even begun to grasp.

What did she know about him, after all? Naught. She was hard-pressed to recall the few tales about his kin she had heard in her childhood, so how could she presume to understand him? She sighed: this uncertainty had not bothered her before, had it? She had shrugged it all off, concerned with nothing but her most immediate goals.

Now, though, like an insidious worm, Grandma Ulra's voice kept coming back to her, the hideous whisper tearing away and fraying her decision. Perhaps some things should remain forgotten, the old frail woman had said, and she had not believed her.

Her own stubbornness in keeping Rhyl'lyn a secret had made her leave the old croon without so much as a scrap of that lore that was better off buried in time.

Had that been a mistake? Should she explain that she had, indeed, found one of the legendary fey? She had defended countless times before that knowledge should be freely shared, and yet here she was, buying supplies for two when she could not afford them and neglecting her chores and usual patients in order to keep him for herself.

It was not right.

She observed his features, all hard angles and sharp planes even while in peaceful slumber, and reached out to arrange the bed covers for him.

And then, someone knocked on the door.

Khalia felt her heart stopping in her chest. She hardly ever had any visitor - only the occasional Reed Shallows fellow who thought his indigestion qualified as a life or death emergency - and she glanced about her cabin in dismay.

"Oh no, no, no…" she whispered, eyeing the small but comfortable space and then the fey. He was asleep, but he was quite male and very much in her bed.

She was the so-called Witch already, she had earned a number of epithets and none of them was gentle… surely more name calling would hold little meaning…

The knocking sounded again, more insistent, and the young woman rushed to the door.

"Who is it?" she called through the heavy wood.

"It's me, Maryoh."

She sighed in relief. It was the fisherman's son. Only a child. The least judgemental person she knew. With a glance towards the bed, where the figure of Rhyl'lyn had not moved at all, she opened the door.

And then she slipped outside and closed it again behind her.

Khalia felt ashamed of her own behaviour - had she not just decided to let people know of the reality of the fey? - but that did not change the results: she blushed prettily and kept silent about her guest.

"It is late for you to be out alone, is it not. You parents must be worried, Maryoh."

The boy shrugged and scratched his head, looking up at her.

"I told Mom I was coming here, and Pa is not back yet. 'Sides, this is safe: you are between me and the Bog."

She smiled and wished it could all be that simple.

"Alright, then. Do you need help?" she asked.

"No," the boy said, his big eyes shining in the setting sun. "Do you?"

"What?"

"You haven't come to the village for three days - I know because I asked the other kids if they had seen you. And you bought so much stuff the last time that I thought you didn't want to come back," Maryoh shrugged again, a picture perfect of innocence and worried diligence, and Khalia felt a pang.

She'd not have thought the boy would pay attention to such things, and even if he did, she was sure that he had more than enough work at his own home to come to help her. As a matter of fact, she realized, that was probably why he had visited so late into the evening: he had just finished with his own chores, hadn't he?

"Thanks for thinking about me. But as you can see, I'm fine. If I haven't been around much, it's because no one has needed my help," she said.

It was mostly the truth.

"Do you hate Reed Shallows?"

"Not at all," that, though, was not an honest answer and Khalia had to flick her gaze away for an instant.

"I thought you did. I thought you were leaving."

"I'm not going anywhere," Khalia smiled at the observant boy, feeling the guilty at the blatant lie. She had to add to herself, _not yet_.

"Oh. Alright, then," Maryoh grinned, apparently happy with his discoveries. "I should go back, then, before Pa arrives."

"Isn't it already quite late for your father to be out?" Khalia frowned a bit, and the kid shrugged.

"He wanted to make good distance upstream today, he said."

"Okay. Then, you should head home and be ready to give him a welcome hug."

With a laugh, Maryoh waved and started to run back towards the village and Khalia waited until he was out of sight.

Upriver, she thought with a deep breath. Problems were brewing, Maryoh's father had told her the last time. She would have to ask whether he had learned something new, she decided as she re-entered the house.

She found a pair of burning golden red eyes that stared at her from a dark corner, and she gasped in surprise.

"I see the nap agreed with you," she said, trying to cover her reaction.

"Yes," Rhyl'lyn replied in his slow cadence. "Who was out?" he asked then, nodding towards the door.

"A child. He wondered why he had not seen me lately and came to see if everything was okay."

"Why would not be?"

Khalia locked her door for the night, to give herself something to do, and wondered: wasn't the fey's speech much more fluid? If it weren't impossible, she'd say that was the case.

"Usually, I go up to the village every two days, but since I was taking care of you and didn't want to leave you alone and unconscious, I've been away a bit longer."

Rhyl'lyn frowned, focusing on her words, and finally he nodded to himself and asked:

"More than two days I be here, then."

"Yes. I found you four days ago."

Another nod.

"Did you tell about me."

It was phrased like a question, but it wasn't quite one. More, like a statement. As if he had been, somehow, hearing the conversation and already knew the answer.

"No, I didn't. How did you know that?"

Rhyl'lyn smirked, just a hint of a smile parting his lips.

"No one scream and get in to see."

She laughed, her worries completely forgotten, and started to prepare dinner, as she should have done much earlier instead of just sitting there, thinking nonsense.

"I like your sense of humour," she said while she cut the last piece of old bread.

Her back was turned, so she did not notice the assessing look the dokkar gave her, and she took his non-committal mumble as modest acquiescence.

o O o

Black spires of smoke rose into the air from beyond the battlements of Seafair. The city was too far to notice now, but he knew that those swirling tufts carried the cloying stench of burned flesh with them.

The man was refreshing himself in the cool water of the Astror river when he heard the distinct sound of water breaking against the hull of a ship. He hadn't felt the boat approaching and was mildly surprised when a man leaned over the side and called out to him.

He waited, half curious and half bored, until the boat pulled up close enough for the sailor to talk without crying his lungs out. He smirked when he saw the look on the other's face: neither the captain nor the rest of the crew expected to see a foreigner alone and so far from civilization.

"Hail, traveller," the captain said after a short pause.

"Hey," the man offered a lazy nod in turn.

"Are you perhaps bound to Seafair?"

The man laughed.

"No. _From _Seafair."

The fisherman hoped to hear that answer, and the man saw nothing wrong with telling the truth.

"Perhaps you bring news? I see that something is burning. "

A smirk, a shrug.

"Yeah. People is burning. There were some duels. The lords of something of other came around to figure out what happened. There was more dueling. A bunch of idiots got themselves killed. And since the lords are sticking around, the city is wasting the winter reserves of wood to make it look nice. Nothing interesting in that town at all, so I left. The booze sucked, anyway."

"I had heard rumors of war…" the sailor started, and the man laughed.

"War? Nah, just someone having some fun. Nothing out of the ordinary: the lords didn't find anything wrong with it anyway, no matter how hard they poked they dainty noses in business that were not their own."

The sailor exchanged a glance with the rest of his crew and nodded solemnly, as if he had just succeeded in his life's mission.

"You got your answers," the man said then, his smirk turning more wolfish. "Care to answer a question now?"

A guarded nod.

"Tell me, what can I find around here?"

"Around… here?"

"You heard me."

"Well…" the sailor gave this some thought. "If you follow the road to the south some thirteen miles and ignore the small villages along the way, you're bound to run into Thornridge. It was a big place back in the day: it used to be the seat of the lords for this region, but now it's just a nest for bandits. Beyond that city, following the river, the plains give way to the treacherous Brookmoor. You'd do well to avoid that hole, sir. It's full of danger, and whoever crosses its boundaries may never come out again. If I were you, I'd turn back and go west from Seafair: that should take you to more friendly places."

The man listened to the sailor with a pensive look and, as he reached a decision, a grin spread across his features.

"Thanks for the tip," he said. "Good fishing to you."

"Good day, sir. Safe travels to you."

"Safe?" the man muttered when he was well away from the boat, the sailor and the riverbank. "I hope not. That would be dull."

And he turned his steps along the road that rolled on side by side with the Astror river.

Southbound.

o O o

Lochhaven was beautiful in every season, but perhaps Lehri liked it best just as it was then, the foliage striving to reach ever higher with renewed vigour after the long, silent months of winter. There were hundreds of shades of green, and the sun would reach the floor as dancing specks of light filtered by the exuberant, ancient trees.

It was breathtaking, and it was also safe.

No one but the fey had visited the dark, mossy confines of the forest for longer than she cared to remember: Man avoided its old, ageless eyes. The place was the only remnant of Emain Ablach left upon the World and somehow this fact still protected it from colonization, from plundering.

Sometimes she wondered whether it also protected it from themselves: the fey had been living in a cocoon for three ages, untouched by the changes of the World and unable to touch it in turn.

Of course, they were not prisoners. No, that role was for their brothers, their dark brothers, confined to the Lands Beyond the Land. They were free to travel and see and listen, as she knew Idoda had done on frequent occasions: he had ranged the moors beyond the forest, had crossed the raging Astror river and wandered the lands of Man. But still, even when they were away, there was an eerie part of Lochhaven that went with them, was there not?

A part that kept them aloof and silent and invisible as they surveyed with detached curiosity the scars left in the World by the departure of the Kind.

Or perhaps she was wrong. She couldn't tell. She was too young, she had never seen Emain Ablach nor the World as it was meant to be. That was why she needed to see, now.

"You don't need to come," a soft voice whispered behind her, as if reading her thoughts, and she turned to Sahin with a smile.

"But I do. You might not believe me, but I will be a valuable companion. I can take care of myself and help you as well."

"I never doubted as much," Sahin said with a sigh. "But it will be hard, and there is no reason for you to submit yourself to the hardship."

"I don't see you complaining about Idoda's company."

"Idoda knows the ways of the World, as well as the terrain we should expect."

"Whereas I know nothing and am not useful, you mean."

"I didn't say that, and you know it."

"You didn't use so many words, but that was what you meant."

Sahin would have loved to reply, if only he had found the right words. But he didn't, and he could only tell her the truth.

"You know naught but Lochhaven, and once we cross the treeline everything will change. The World is a broken place, a place where you can't hear the voice of the wind in the branches, and we will be gone for a long time."

"I feel trapped!" Lehri snapped. "If I can't go because I have never gone before, what can I look forward to?"

"M'lord means well, Lehri," the calm voice of Idoda interrupted them. He was already prepared for travel, comfortable clothes and light pack hanging from one shoulder. "There is great danger outside and he does not want you to risk yourself running after an ideal that does not exist."

"What do you know of what I expect?" she said, rounding on him with frustration.

"You expect to see lands of rolling hills under the sun and crystal torrents of water accompanying you every other step of the way. You expect to see the remains of the cities of old and the battlefields the songs speak about. You expect to see the temples to the gods and the sons of Man dancing in them. Am I wrong?"

"Yes!" but then she bit her lip, and a small smile stole over her features. "No," she admitted at last. "How can you know me so well?"

Idoda shrugged with a small smile of his own. His, though, was sad and wary where hers was hopeful and anxious.

"Because that is what I expected to see. M'lord warned me as well, but I chose not to listen. You will not find it."

Lehri darted a look to Sahin, whose grave eyes were still fixed upon her, waiting for her to make the right decision and stay in their safe haven.

"Is it the danger of disappointment, then? What will I find?"

"Tamed land and the ghosts of forests long dead. Perhaps a broken pillar covered by ivy and moss and eroded into nothingness by time and rain, if you are lucky."

"And what about the sons of Man?"

"We will not see them but from afar," Sahin cut in.

"Why?" Lehri frowned, surprised at the tone the kind fey had used.

"Because they are the danger I referred to," supplied Idoda when his lord chose to remain silent.

Lehri left her pack fall to the floor.

"I don't understand. I know there are things we can't tell them, things we can't show them. But, to avoid them altogether?"

"We are not like them," Sahin tried to explain.

"We have never been."

"Lehri," Idoda, again, with his calming baritone, stepped in for his lord's sake. "They have forgotten."

"It cannot be."

"Three ages have passed," he went on, his deep gray eyes holding hers and making her understand. "The memory of man is short lived. The World is broken, and it does not only mean that Emain Ablach is no more: we are broken, too. Man is broken, and has learnt to fear what is different. To fear us."

Every word, in spite of the soft tone, felt like a painful stab to her chest. She felt her eyes tearing up and she turned without a second thought into the protective embrace of Sahin when he put his hand to her shoulder to offer comfort.

"The War started because of them," she managed to mutter. "We forsake our role as the artisans of the gods for them, we turned destroyers and traitors and killers because of them… and now we are nothing?"

"And that is what I wanted to protect you from," Sahin whispered into her hair, and she drew strength from his voice and straightened again.

"Thank you," she smiled, tentative, shakily. "But more than ever, I must go. You might need me, and even though my training has just finished, I won't fail you."

"I never believed that you would," Sahin replied with a resigned sigh and nodded to Idoda. "The three of us will part, then."

Bowing his head in assent, Idoda closed his eyes for a moment, as if listening to the wind and to Lochhaven itself, and then started to walk in silence, weaving his path among the colossal trees and the flickering rays of the morning sun. Sahin followed close and Lehri only stayed behind long enough to pick up her bag and to cast a last, longing look to the only home she had ever known.

She didn't know when she would be back.


	5. A trail of burning ashes

A/N: _Here it is, the next chapter. It has been a week from hell, but thankfully I had it written in advance. Today, once more, I wanted to stress my thanks to Peres and Arcole, my great reviewers (and idea-bouncing walls, I guess...), and say thanks to anon. reviewer, Groupon this time. Okay, on with the story. Please, let me hear your thoughts!_

o O o

**5. A trail of burning ashes**

o O o

The voice of a nightingale sang loud and clear somewhere in the gardens of the villas that flanked the road from Seafair to Thornridge. While once upon a time the opulent mansions would have held gilded cages with exotic birds to regale the ears of the household and to boast in front of visiting nobles, the time for grandeur was long past and nightingales had been silent for years.

However, their song had not been forgotten.

For years, it had preceded the arrival of lone riders and small parties alike, warning the rascals who inhabited the dilapidated halls.

Renar looked up and rubbed the remnants of sleep from his clear eyes, listening intently to the song. Just a man, he heard. On foot. There would not be much gold, he sighed, but they needed whatever they could find. Thornridge's decline meant that less and less people travelled the roads to and from the once powerful regional seat, and that was bad for business.

The last days had been worse than usual as well, he reflected as he kicked awake his two accomplices. Merchants and fools had stopped traversing the region and they had not been able to hold up a rider with a decent bag of gold for over a month.

Their little Nightingale band was gaining recognition, or so Renar liked to think. And it could also be the truth, for even though the band was small, it was also fierce and extremely active.

With a professionalism born of many seasons of pillage, Renar led his group to the road and told each of the three men where to hide, what signal to expect, how to act. Routine, really: they had done the same a number of times and even the slower of the men, Tryson, could perform with his eyes closed.

It was just a little habit, hard to break.

The nightingale sang closer and finished its call with a staccato, and Renar saw their target.

The man appeared to be thirty, or near enough to make no difference. His height would not stand out in a crowd, but he seemed taller to the eye thanks to his long limbs and lean physique. The hair was straight and thick, raven black, and his skin was tanned from walking under the sun. He wore just woollen pants and a tunic that fell to mid-thigh, and it did not seem like he hid much gold in the satchel slung across his shoulders. But the man carried a long blade tucked into his wide belt, and such a weapon had not been obtained for free.

Whatever the case, it was a coup.

Renar stepped out to the middle of the way and took two measured steps towards the traveller. A foreigner, he realized when he was close enough to discern the bone structure of the face and the almond-shaped eyes. A stranger from beyond the Astror river.

He made a gesture and two of his cronies abandoned their hideouts to flank the man. The third remained in place, a crossbow at the ready. The lookout would join them with a bow as they made the presentations.

"Well met, genteel traveller," Renar greeted the man. "I am afraid that you may go no further if you do not comply with the local customs first."

The man smirked, white teeth flashing as he appraised Renar without paying attention to the bandits who closed in on his sides.

"Let me guess. There is a toll to pass through this shit-dump of a town."

Renar smiled in turn, tense.

"There is, indeed, a fee. We prefer to call it the liberation fee, for it aims to support the widows and children of the revolution."

"You shouldn't have rebelled if you didn't want widows or orphans. Now, step aside."

Renar kept his expression locked, but he saw his companions frown. The rebellion, the downfall of Thornridge, had happened nearly ten years before and, certainly, orphans made their living and widows had either died or moved on. Of course, he intended to keep the gold. After all, he had always believed that relief should begin by oneself.

But still.

"I do not like your words, nor your tone, foreigner."

"Too bad. Perhaps you should have thought about it before forcing me to speak."

"Perhaps you are right. We will alleviate you of your load, and then you may proceed on your silent way."

The man barked a laugh, dry and wild. His expression reminded Renar of a wolf.

"I could tell you that I've nothing of value without lying, but I'll say something else instead: Fuck off."

Renar tensed and let his hand loosen up his sword on its scabbard.

"Who do you think you are? Know that you are surrounded!"

"By the pair of idiots standing idly at my back and the imbecile on top of the fence to my right? Yeah, good surrounding," the man's black eyes glinted and he smirked once more. Then, shrugging off his satchel and letting it fall to the ground a good two feet in front of him, he continued:

"There you have it: all my possessions. Come and get them, if you dare."

"The sword," Renar snarled.

But the stranger rocked back on his heels and waited with an amused look to his countenance, and Renar finally nodded to one of his men.

His lackey lowered his longsword and approached their prey as one might approach a wounded bear: with slow, calculated movements and muscles coiled tight to spring away. He crouched to recover the bag, expert gaze taking in every possible detail and never leaving the man's eyes nor his hands.

And then, there was a blur of movement and a flash of steel, and a thud as the body fell.

Renar swallowed. His comrade had been nearly cleaved in two: the blow had fallen in an arch from above, hitting the man's left clavicle, and the blade had cut through flesh and bone in a diagonal slash to his hip. Gone before touching the ground, the bandit did not convulse, did not cry out. He only died.

The stranger's sword, a slender weapon with a single, slightly curved blade, was clean and innocent in his hands.

He took an involuntary step backwards, just a shift of his weight, and the man laughed.

"Running away, so soon? I thought you wanted to rob me."

There was a twang and a bolt streaked straight to the man's heart, and Renar wondered about what he had truly seen: the man seemed not to move, his feet remained planted in place - and yet the torso twisted with grace and speed, too fast to follow, and the bolt skidded along the side of the road, getting lost amidst wilted rose bushes.

Renar waited a fraction of a second, to allow his man to reload, and then gestured to his remaining swordsman. The two of them approached the stranger in a circle, swords at the ready. The one took three steps, two the other, and then twin twangs marked the flight of two missiles: the first one, and the scout's. And with choreographed precision, Renar and his partner closed in, using the cover and the openings created by the ranged attack.

The stranger exploded into motion. His blade sang, there was a scream of steel on steel, and the arrow fell. Two steps, like a dancer's, and somehow he was circling the bandits from the outside. Renar saw his friend stop, he saw him twist and adjust, he saw him block the stranger's blow.

But the stranger was no longer there: he had changed direction, the bolt flying harmless more than two hands away, and his sword glinted and a perfect line painted in red appeared on the bandit's chest, from shoulder to opposite hip.

Renar called out a name, and the lookout appeared on the road tensing his bow anew, and he charged the stranger and rushed empty air. He barely felt the blow to his back, delivered with the blunt edge, but even as he fell he was conscious of the silence, of the bow that never sang.

He saw the man's boots dancing in front of him, light on the balls of his feet, and then he saw other pair of running boots, from his marksman, and then a body falling, dead, eyeless, the shaft of a bolt protruding from an empty socket.

"Who are you?" Renar heard his voice asking in a whisper when the foreigner came to a stand in front of him, clothing as clean as before, not a drop of sweat on his body and not a breath harsher than the next.

A grin, a shrug.

"I'm the Black Demon. I'd ask who you are, but I could care less."

And the nightingale sang no more.

o O o

The three fey that abandoned the safe confines of Lochhaven were not a glorious entourage. They were three figures shrouded in dark woollen cloaks, hiding their features behind deep cowls. They were three shadows who avoided roads and settlements, cutting through the wilderness that spread between the farm fields like ghosts in the small hours. They avoided the sun, and the noise, and walked around whatever life they might find on their way.

"We behave like criminals," Lehri whispered in the second day.

"We are not," Sahin replied. "However, it might be difficult to explain such a fact to the sons of Man."

"It is better this way," Idoda's voice drifted back from his guide position, and Lehri swallowed any retort she might have been about to deliver.

Sahin stared after the young female for a few more moments, and then refocused his attention on his step: silent, deft, he made sure to leave no trail. It was a welcome distraction, and it kept his worries at bay. He did not know whether it had been wise to travel in company, and every time he looked at Lehri he was reminded of his own doubts: she was a bit like Iladruel, was she not? She did not have a Dreamer's gift, but her eyes did see too much. She saw beyond what was into what could be. She saw into the soul, as the princesses of old were wont to do, and Sahin believed that the World had become too harsh a place for her sensibilities.

But he was uneasy about Idoda's presence as well, and the male was a scout of ascertained capabilities who had served him for the past two centuries without being remiss to his duty once, so perhaps he was growing weak in his old age.

He smiled at the thought: old. What a human concept. How alien for the fey. And yet, in spite of the immense divide between their peoples, he still used the word. Did the humans remember them as well? Did they use absurd expressions, without quite knowing where they came from?

"We must not travel further," Idoda's voice brought him out of his reverie. "We will set up camp and proceed when the moon is high enough."

"What will we do, then?" Lehri asked.

"I shall find a crossing while you two rest. We will have to wade."

Sahin followed Idoda's nod with his eyes and, sure enough, there it was: a silver scintillating snake, reflecting the rays of a declining sun. The Astror river. The greatest natural frontier for Lochhaven's fey.

Of all the trackers and wanderers who Sahin knew, only a handful had crossed the crystalline divide, and only Idoda had done it more than once.

"Isn't it too big?" Lehri said, unsure, half fearing and half reveling the fabled current.

"Yes, it is."

Sahin had to wonder whether Idoda knew the meaning of diplomacy. His blunt, honest answers were appreciated by his lord, but did little to assuage the female.

"There must be another way," she said, her penetrating gaze running up and down the riverbanks. "What is… that?"

Both Idoda and Sahin followed her pointing finger, and the former sighed.

"Human's docks. A barge. They use it to cross the river, for commerce."

"Can't we use that… barge as well?"

"No," Idoda replied.

"It is better if no one sees us," Sahin added to soften the sharp word.

"If you are sure."

And the next day saw them on the other bank, drying their cloaks as they hid from the river and from the fields and from the roads.

"M'lord, where should we go now?" Idoda said while they rested after their crossing.

"I know not. The dream was vague at best, you know that much. Is something the matter?"

The blond glanced to Lehri, so subtle that she never took notice, and then sighed.

"I am uneasy, m'lord."

"We are far from Lochhaven."

"No."

"What is the matter, then?"

"The silence, m'lord. The barge lies still, and Man and beast alike seem to be asleep."

Sahin frowned and Lehri rested her delicate hand on Idoda's forearm, as if to offer her support.

"We will not lower our guard," was all the fey lord could say.

However, and since the moment his tracker pointed it out, he felt it as well: the silence, the oppressive silence seemed to permeate everything. There was nothing but the wordless moaning of the wind. There were no creatures within sight nor earshot, and by the time they decided to march again, Sahin found himself listening to the sound of his boots against the soil just to alleviate the tension.

Later, even though it was gentle and soft, he still heard Lehri's gasp loud like the cracking of a whip.

"I see them," Idoda nodded, and Sahin recognized then the black, undulating shadow looming over the horizon.

Ravens, he realized.

"What are they doing?" Lehri gave voice to his question.

"I do not know. We will backtrack and turn to the north," the scout shrugged. "It will give us ample of berth."

"We don't need berth! We need to see what is wrong."

"Unwise," Idoda replied at once. "Look around you: the lands, the paths. It is obvious that we would find a settlement of Man."

"So?"

"I thought you understood: we are to avoid them at all costs," the male turned his deep, impassive eyes on her and she flushed prettily.

"We could still hide from them, but we should see what has happened," she repeated, much more inhibited. "Ravens would not flock to a village like that."

Idoda went to reply, but Sahin shook his head:

"No, Lehri is right: we are looking for signals. The silence has been encroaching in on us for a long while now: perhaps these ravens will give us an answer."

"As you command, m'lord. I shall go ahead. Thirty paces."

Sahin nodded, knowing better than to gainsay him in his own expertise field, and Lehri called out behind his retreating back,

"Keep safe!"

The pair of them waited until Sahin judged Idoda to be around thirty paces ahead and then moved, silently, their faces hidden deep into the shadows of their cowls and their cloaks concealing their lithe, graceful forms.

It took what was left of the morning to reach the ravens, and the midday sun beat down on their backs as they saw, for the first time, the homes of Man.

It was a small village: the settlement was not impressive, and just a look sufficed to know that the place had no name to be remembered by. A handful of wood and adobe houses, an equally shabby abode built with irregular stones to function as inn, tavern and town hall, and a central plaza wherein Idoda knelt.

The ravens circling overhead were everywhere, like a black maelstrom protecting them from curious eyes as they joined their companion.

"He is alive," Idoda said, his voice empty of emotion as his hands tried to staunch the gaping wound on the man's chest.

"Is he… a man?" Lehri whispered, kneeling by his side and staring over his shoulder.

"Yes," the young fey replied. "An old one."

"Old?" Lehri repeated, as if hearing the word for the first time.

She understood the meaning for the first time, Sahin thought as he looked at the man and at the younger fey with a strange mixture of nostalgia and pity.

"Is this the result of age for Man, then? How terrible… To think that the centuries would leave a person like this."

"The decades."

"What?"

Idoda shrugged, shifting a bit to put more pressure into his grim task.

"He might have lived for fifty years. No more than sixty."

And Sahin mourned the dry understanding of Idoda and Lehri's loss of innocence, and the fey lord bent the knee to examine the man.

A farmer, probably. Someone battered by a long life of travail, of fierce fighting against the lands.

"He is beyond our help," he said, and he was surprised at the bitterness of his own words.

Idoda nodded, retired his hands and cleaned them as best he could on the weeds and grass that grew under the shadow of the one stone house. Lehri lowered her head in shame: she had not even thought to help the man, so fascinated she had been by the sight.

Sahin whispered a quick prayer and cursed the War, as he had done since the moment he had lifted a blade for the first time.

Before, when the World was not broken, he would have been able to heal the man. But that was before: when they were still the makers and the artisans, and the grace of the gods ran through their veins. Now, shallower cuts would take away all of his strength - and the old man had already been weak and nearly bled out by the time they had found him.

He stood and turned his back, not wanting to look the failure of fey in the face.

"Where are the rest of the sons of Man?" he asked instead.

"Dead," Idoda whispered, his eyes lost in the southern horizon after the trail of blood. "Dead or gone. No one will come back to this place."

"What kind of monster would do such a thing?" Lehri wondered, still shaken.

"Man would," came Idoda's laconic reply.

"Man against man? With such viciousness?"

A shrug.

"They have been known to do so before. Man, amusingly enough, is fond of war."

"Or perhaps," Sahin interrupted, turning back to the youths. "Perhaps we have found our signal."


	6. Remembrance

A/N: _I'm exhausted (laughs) This is a pivotal chapter and one I have come to love, and yet... Well, you'll see what I mean. Please, read, enjoy, and feel free to tear me apart with constructive criticism. I know I need it!_

o O o

**6. Remembrance**

o O o

Two days.

Two days were all it took for Rhyl'lyn to gather enough strength to stop being a useless, bedridden infirm. The first afternoon after coming back to his senses, he dared to flex his arms and legs, to sit up on the cot. The second saw him standing, tall and proud in spite of his stagger and of the tickle of sweat that ran down his forehead with the effort.

Khalia, true to her word, hadn't left the cabin more than it was, he assumed, strictly necessary, and she hovered by his side with a worried frown while he took a tentative step.

He felt the strain the gesture put on his body, he felt the world lurch, and then he pressed on and took another step. And another. The dokkar smiled: he had lost precious time lying in a deathbed, but he was recovering. Not nearly as fast as he would have in another time, in another place, but vigour returned to his limbs with every passing hour. The throb of life was powerful and it mended his ailing body in spite of the mark marring his right hand.

Lowering his gaze to his blackened fingers, he tried to close them in a fist and winced at the burning sensation: it'd be a long time before it faded, if it ever did, but at least he had recovered its use.

"I don't think you should go any further," Khalia's voice interrupted his musings. "You were in delirium not that long ago: you need more time to recover."

He tilted his head to look back at her and smirked.

"I am fine."

"You're trembling."

"It will pass. I must regain strength," he said, his cadence still foreign but his wording nearly perfect.

"That's what I'm saying: you are not strong. You need to regain your strength," the young woman explained, as if he were an unruly child.

Rhyl'lyn said nothing but took two more steps instead. All the way to the fireplace, sharp turn to the left, back towards the bed. Except for a slight shuffle when he reached the far wall, his paces were even, smooth, and Khalia found herself gaping.

"What…? But you could hardly get up from the bed!"

"What?," he asked, amused. "Fey. You said yourself."

She flushed and nodded. It was not as if she could have forgotten: his voice, his features, his figure: the stark reminders were there every time she turned her eyes to him, and she had to admit that she looked at him more often than not. But in some paradox she could not even begin to grasp, she remembered that he was fey and forgot that he was not human.

"All fey heal fast?"

"Yes."

"That must be amazing. To be able to overcome your wounds and illnesses like that, I mean."

"We know not illness," he snapped, unwilling to pursue that particular conversation even though his outburst left the woman to stare at him in bafflement.

"You were ill when I found you," she insisted.

The dark fey snorted, a gesture that shook his toned shoulders and twisted the sharp planes of his angular face in an unnatural grimace, and his lips moved. However, try as she might, Khalia could not hear his reply: she thought she caught glimpses of sound, like the wind whispering through the trees, or the rolling waves of an ocean she had only heard tales about, and she felt a tug in her mind that willed her to understand…

And yet, she could not.

"What?" she asked, shaking her head. "I can't hear you."

Rhyl'lyn laughed then, short and mirthless.

"You do not know to listen. I said I was not ill, but marked." And once more, he felt the stale taste of that word, too simple to explain what had happened to him - who he was now.

"Your hand," Khalia nodded, overlooking the first statement. "What happened to it?"

Warily, the fey shifted to rest most of his weight against the cabin's table. It was the second time the woman asked, and he wondered what he stood to lose if he told her. She seemed to be unaware of everything when it came to his kin.

"I was marked," he repeated at long last.

"Yes, but how? Why?"

"I disobeyed," he said with a smirk. "This mark tells it is so."

"What did you do? Will you tell me?"

"Decided to escape."

"They caught you?"

"No. If they had, I would be dead. It was before."

"Wait: they marked you because you _thought _of escaping? Nothing else?"

She asked too many questions, and Rhyl'lyn found he didn't want to answer her anymore. It made him remember, and the memories tasted like bile in his mouth. Pushing away from the table, he reached out to open the door, making a point of using his right hand.

And then he screamed, and screamed, his body falling to the floor and writhing in painful convulsions as his skin burned and his eyes melted under the assault of white-hot light.

Khalia shouted something and rushed to his side, and he felt her trying to hold him steady, but the spears of the early afternoon rays kept piercing his head, the heat hammering against his chest, and he easily threw her off. It was agony, almost as cruel as it had been when he had been branded, almost as terrible as his voyage to the World, and he didn't know for how long it lasted before the door slammed shut and the cabin was plunged once more in a mild twilight.

For several long moments, the woman stared at him and he tried to steady his pulse.

"What was that?" she asked when her shaking allowed her to form words, and he noted the fear underlying her tone.

"That was sun," he said. His voice was harsh, but the tone was not aimed to the girl: no, it was for the sun itself. Three ages ago, it - _they _- had been the enemy, had battled the dokkar with merciless passion, had hunted them down. Three ages of victory had not served to lessen the viciousness reserved for the losing side, it seemed, and while it was a hard blow it was not unexpected.

He had known that he'd have to deal with this, that his enemies thrived under the blasting rays of the sun, and he was willing to face it. He'd conquer whatever obstacle he must in order to achieve his goals.

Twisting around with an undignified gasp until he could rest his back against the closed door, he cut a glance to the woman who sat by his side and stared at him with dark eyes, wide because of the shock and fear. He sighed. He had to admit that it had not been a pleasant sight, and that he could no longer hide who he was.

"What do you know of fey?" he prompted her in a soft tone, watching as her brow furrowed in confusion.

"They were gone," she replied, as if by heart. "They fled when Man came, never to return. They are beings of light and grace, and… wisdom. And they know magic."

Khalia judged it prudent to narrate the most plausible accounts of her childhood and leave out the disturbing image painted by Ulra's voice, but still he snorted.

"The gods tell it so, these days?"

"The god doesn't tell anything," she laughed. "At least, nothing about the fey. I learned through the tales I heard in my childhood."

He frowned at that, processing her words, and his deep eyes searched her for the truth with such intensity that Khalia had to shift under the scrutiny. Then, when he ascertained that she spoke the truth, he took a deep breath and buried his head in his hands. The world had indeed changed and it occurred to him that, if he did not learn in what ways, he would never succeed.

"You know of the War?" he asked with caution, lifting his gaze and fixing it on Khalia.

The conversation ahead would be long and trying, and he needed to ascertain her every reaction to his words if he wanted to be sure of where she stood - of whether he could trust the information she gave him in turn. To her credit, she seemed to understand the gravity of his mood and she gave him an open, honest answer.

"I was too small, but I remember a bit of the War of Thorns. My father sometimes talked about the big wars in the north when I was a kid, but I can't tell you much about those. And then, I know about the…"

Rhyl'lyn held up a hand, horrified. Just how much violence had ravaged this land that had once been the peaceful home of his kind?

"The War of the Gods," he clarified.

Khalia blinked, frowned, bit her lip, and he wanted to scream and to cry and to laugh all at once: she did not know a thing.

"That is just a name, isn't it," she asked then. "What do you mean, the gods? Who would a god wage war on?"

"You do know," he started, making himself comfortable in the packed dirt floor of her cabin, "that there are… driving forces," he struggled to form an explanation with the limited vocabulary of Man.

"Yes. There is light and, opposing to it, there is darkness."

He thought about that. It was not accurate, it was much too simple and simplistic, but it'd have to do.

"What else can you tell?" he chose not to correct her.

"Well, the god dances in the light," she said, slightly self conscious of the words she had not repeated since before her father passed away. "And he keeps the darkness away, because if ever the lands were to be covered in shades, it would mean the end."

Rhyl'lyn sat for a few moments in stunned silence. Was that her view? Did she really believe that there was nothing beyond light and darkness? Did she abhor the darkness, as she seemed to? Why did she keep referring to a single god?

"I have a long tale to tell you. The tale of fey," he said at length.

o O o

_"They were the only alir who lived in the World. While the gods and the endless souls danced in the boundary of what Was, the fey made their home where all things ephemeral dwelt. _

_"Among them, there were dreamers who could unravel the tapestry of the World and guide every strand to its rightful place. There were also those who could understand the turning tides of Time and those who had learned to dance the ever-changing steps of the gods. They had many talents, indeed. _

_"But, above all else, all fey were artisans. _

_"They turned what Was into what Could be and into what Should be. They were observers and judges and makers, and they created villages and cities and empires, bestowed crops and game, gifted tools and drew the line between life and death. They lived in perpetual peace, as guides and providers and sages, and the dream of Emain Ablach was woven by the hearts and minds of fey and man. _

_"That was the beginning of their downfall. _

_"Perhaps it was the pride of the fey. Perhaps the World changed them, turned them less alir and more sons of man. Perhaps their souls could not understand death. Or perhaps it was that although they made cities for man to dwell, man always needed bigger settlements. It might have been that they made crops for man to harvest, but man ate them all and was not satisfied. It could be that they made tools for man to hunt, but the arrows and the spears always broke in time. _

_"Everything broke in time and the fey immortal, untouched by the ravages of centuries, were powerless in front of the limited lifespan granted to man. _

_"Their charges, the only ones who shared their Reign of Promise, withered away, their passion and their strength gone and transformed into dust in a blink. _

_"It hurt. _

_"And yet, man found its own immortality. Their dreams and their hopes lived on in their sons. Their number grew, and this marked the end of the dream. _

_"Fey did not grow jealous. Fey did not come to hate those they had learned to love. But fey were few: they were too few to care for all the fields, to find all the quarries, to heal all the wounds. _

_"Fey despaired, the gods took notice of their plight. But the gods and the endless souls decreed that all was as it was meant to be. _

_"It is true that there are driving forces in the World, forces that permeate and impregnate every creature, every item. Indeed, they are part of every soul, even of those of the fey and of the gods. They are not, however, light and darkness. They are beginning and end. Action and reaction. Instinct and knowledge. Mind and passion. _

_"In the imagery of man, there were creatures of sun and its perpetuity, its power., its reason. And there were creatures of moon and its change, its adaptability, its feeling. And, as they did on the vault of the heavens with each passing cycle, sun and moon completed each other in a balance of pure perfection. _

_"The schism, when it started, was not a rebellion. It was not even organized. _

_"It was a gesture of kindness. _

_"One fey, somewhere, taught a man how to sow instead of how to recollect. Another, somewhere else, taught another how to straighten an arrow so that it would fly always true. Another explained how to ease the pain of childbirth, and yet another revealed what concoction would help a worried mother to sleep. _

_"And man learned: how to repair the broken plows, how to build, how to predict the weather, how to heal their ill and care for their old and young. _

_"The moon fey had disobeyed the ruling of the gods, had acted behind the backs of their brethren, had followed a tendril of feeling against all the strength of reason and had taught man to make his own fate. The fey who secluded themselves in their minds and their books and their rules never understood why they did it, but still it was not the sun fey who brought the war. _

_"It was, after all, the War of the Gods. _

_"The moon gods, in their compassion, had always approved of the sharing of knowledge and so they cried and begged, asking the other alir to understand that it was necessary. The sun gods shook their heads, because it did not matter that things were fair but that things were meant to be. They never reached an agreement. _

_And so they sent their lesser ones to march across the World and the Beyond, each side unable to abide by the reasons of the other, the ones seeking to protect the knowledge that had been spread and the others to spread the knowledge so that it would be protected, and it was then that the makers became destroyers. _

_"Of course, the fey had destroyed before. To make something, anything, something else must disappear. Destruction is inherent to creation, for what Could be would take the place of what Was, and so it would become what Had been. In their long time upon the World, the fey had seen this: they had been the wisdom behind every change. _

_"And now, with terrible efficacy, they made… Nothing. Nothing at all. They took their power and their tools - their weapons - and they fought, the ones following the orders of reason, the others pursuing what feeling dictated. _

_"The driving forces are always balanced. The War of the Gods raged on and on, until the fey's bloodstained hands shook in exhaustion and despair of the seemingly eternal stalemate, and even then the battles were fought and won and lost. The fey bled, and every drop of spilled life shredded the World further apart. It could have gone on forever more. _

_"But the gods finished the war, as they had started it. Light and darkness were born then, birthed as the World was torn asunder. _

_"The moon turned her back on the fey. The dark fey. The dokkar, whose impudence in sharing the gift of a maker with the sons of man had brought forth the fight. Such was the ending. _

_"The dark ones surrendered. The mercy they were granted gave them a world of their own: the Otherworld, a perfect prison sealed from the World and from the Beyond, an endless expanse of lightless emptiness where no life would thrive, where none but the dokkar would ever set foot. _

_"'Go and rebuild your Reign of Promise', the sun said. _

_"And the moon? The moon was quiet. "_

Khalia didn't interrupt him and he hoped it meant she had followed him. It was difficult, to revisit those old times of glory he had been robbed of, and it was even more daunting to speak of them in the tongue of man, so he was grateful when she did not require further clarification.

"Are you okay?" Khalia asked when he stopped at last, and only then did he realize that he was so tense that he was shaking.

"Yes," he nodded.

There were a few moments of silence, while the sun bled down the horizon and the encroaching darkness took over the cabin, and then she cleared her throat.

"Did you… did you see that… Emain Agrach?"

"Emain Ablach," he corrected her and shook his head. "Reign of Promise. No, I was born in the Otherworld."

"Oh," she sounded disappointed, but that didn't keep her from asking, "How old are you?"

"Old. We do not count the passage of time as you do. We have no means to mark the years, and only ages are meaningful to us."

"You must think I'm just a child."

Her voice was tinged with genuine disappointment at that realization and her gaze abandoned him, fixing her folded hands in her lap. He examined her in silence, her naivete, her foolishness and her lack of understanding, and then he shrugged.

"You are human. You age and grow old as I do not. It should be foolish of me to compare your lifespan to my experience."

"Okay." She bit her lip for a moment and then asked with a mischievous smile, "Can you still do magic?"

Of all the absurd and ridiculous things she could have asked about. He had revealed to her a World no man could know, he had taught her the origins and the end, he had admitted to who he was and what he wanted. And she asked about 'magic'. 'Magic', an inappropriate term. A mere name man had given to the Changes made by fey, to the one thing they had always coveted and which only the moon… no, only the _dark _elves had given them.

Of course a human would wonder about 'magic'. What else could she care about?

He shook his head silently.

"Why not? The dokkar can't do it?"

"The dokkar can," he said with a bitter smirk. "I cannot."

And he held up his hand, his black hand, his marked hand. A hand that would no longer Make.

A maker who could only destroy forever more.

She seemed to understand. He knew she didn't, because after all she was just a daughter of man, but at least she had the decency to remain quiet after that and that was just as well.

Rhyl'lyn had no desire to keep entertaining her.

o O o

The Astror river rolled on and on, always to his right. The wide waters were faster than he in their trip to the oceans, but he didn't mind. He had no burning desire to reach the shores. His focus, his hopes, were placed on the jagged, dark line that broke the horizon, growing closer with each new step.

The gnarled trees sprouted right on the edge of the plains, and what at first could be mistaken by a copse of local flora following the course of the wide, tumultuous river, soon turned to be a tight, imposing forest. The water that brought life to the fields of green and gold overflowed and drenched the soil, turning the landscape gray and humid in just a few yards. The change from the plains into the swamp was abrupt and it offered a breathtaking sight, and yet the man who walked alone following a trail so thin that it was invisible paid no heed to the grandeur.

He was tired and bored, and he needed to get a drink.

If he were prone to second-guess his decisions, he'd wonder at the wisdom of his choice. Not the one which had him walking south under an unforgiving sun and facing off against banditry aficionados, but the other one. The bright moment of clarity where he had abandoned his own land and decided to cross the Astror river, venturing into what was known as the greatest kingdom of man.

At the time, crossing the great silvery frontier had seemed a sound idea, but after Hillborough, Seafair, Thornridge, and after the countless little hamlets he had already passed by, he found that the fabled place had nothing that the eastern lands were lacking. There were several cities, many towns and enough backwater villages to make his head hurt, but the people inside were not special.

And the booze was of low quality.

The man snorted and waved a bothersome fly from his face.

"The pinnacle of civilization, my ass. They don't even know how to brew horse piss."

He hoped that the Brookmor he was heading into was worth the trip. If he ran into yet more ridiculous peasants who thought that a sickle could qualify as a proper duelling weapon, he was going to be ticked.


	7. Arrogance of race

A/N: _Upping the speed to I can get motivation to finish the thing before going on holidays the next week! We're almost done with the first part – go ahead, you can hate me for this chapter. I know I probably deserve it (grins) No, seriously, give me your honest opinion... I thought it was symbolic and necessary, but I might be wrong. Edits are the tonic of life, after all. Thanks for your support!_

o O o

**7. Arrogance of race**

o O o

The visit to Reed Shallows was not strictly necessary but Khalia had felt the need to leave the cramped space of her cabin if only for a short while. It was not that she didn't love to keep company to the dokkar, quite the opposite. It was just that it was difficult to think straight when those enticing eyes were fixed on her, studying her every mundane move like it was mystifying.

And she needed to think straight. The previous evening had been like a dream, with the slow brogue of the dark fey walking her along a tale full of marvels the likes of which she had never dared to imagine. She had been thrilled when his descriptions had shed light upon the dark words of Grandma Ulra, helping her to understand the contradictory message and to understand him.

But there were things she still did not grasp. For example, the continuous references he had made to "the gods", as if there were several of them. Or the exact nature of the alir he belonged to. He had said fey were immortal, but that was just not possible, was it? Nothing was eternal except the god and the darkness, lurking forevermore.

She shook her head. That issue didn't matter. One or thousands, they weren't there. The fey was. And he was a dark fey, which meant he had already chosen to teach his magic to Man once. It was a magic he could not perform, he had said, but that didn't mean he could not show how it was done. The mere thought made Khalia smile. She would learn the forgotten art, she decided. She would master the skill that had broken the world and condemned a whole race to exile.

She would be someone important and no one would mind the fact that she was young and single and a woman. They would have to look at her in awe as she healed them without herbs.

Was this one the choice Grandma Ulra had warned her about? Would it be the correct one? But of course it would be! Then, why was Ulra so worried?

Part of her did not care. Another part was scared.

It was the small, scared part of her that guided her footsteps beyond the outskirts of town and towards the old shack where the elder woman lived.

The chill seeped her bones as she approached the ransacked house, whose shadow loomed over her even when she was still several yards away. What should she say? Walking into the old woman's room as she had last time would not help her. Should she share her secret?

Khalia wove her way between two other buildings, as if she had intended to circumvent the lonely hut from the beginning. She had held doubts about the wisdom of keeping the fey a secret, but every passing moment tempered her resolution like steel.

She had seen the look lurking in the fey's eyes as he talked of the way his kin had shared their gift with man. She had seen that because of that gift, he had suffered for longer than she could comprehend. She could not turn him in to the rest of the community and force him to revive the ordeal time and again. She could not expose him like that.

No, she would hide him until he chose to reveal himself. In the meantime, she thought with a smile, they would have plenty of time for him to give her his lost magic.

That was her choice and it was right. Grandma Ulra and her ominous words could be laid to rest in her mind.

Heaving a great sigh, Khalia grinned like a fool and walked faster. She should buy some supplies to justify her absence from her home, she guessed. It would feel weird to tell the dokkar that she had just been away pondering whether to hand him over to the whole village or keep him for herself.

She giggled at the idea.

And then she gasped as a man stumbled out of the village's small alehouse, his eyes wide and his hands clutching his bleeding stomach.

She watched in horror as the man collapsed against her and she could only stare at the bloody saliva falling from his lips. She knew this man, she realized. It was Gard, the one who kept a handful of sheep in his backyard and acted as butcher from time to time.

The light in his eyes went out as if he were one of the newborn lambs he used to kill.

Khalia never knelt by his side to help. She didn't have the time. A commotion came from the alehouse and another man ran out of the door, face pale and eyes wide in fear. He would have shoved her out of his way, she knew. She saw him prepare to push with his left shoulder and she braced herself, unable to jump aside.

But she never felt him crash against her.

Instead, he fell like a limp sack of grain to the floor at her feet, partly on top of Gard. It had been Reimund. And behind him stood a dark stranger with a bored look and a clean, silvery blade naked in his hand.

"Bah. If you didn't want to fight, you shouldn't have called it on," the man told the corpses as if they could hear him.

Khalia stared at him, trembling. She did not know him. His hair was dark as a raven's wing and his features were sharp, the cut too foreign to belong in Reed Shallows.

He did not even belong to the west of the Astror river, she realized with a sick feeling to her stomach. He had come from the lands of savages beyond the kingdom's natural frontier, and he had come seeking blood.

His eyes, as black as his hair, spared her a curious glance and that was all she needed to gather her courage and race back towards her home.

That man was a murderer, she told herself over the wild beating of her heart. He had come to their peaceful community to amuse himself with their suffering.

She had to stop him, and she knew just how to do it.

o O o

The man stared after the retreating Khalia for a long moment suspended in time. Though his relaxed and bored demeanor did no change in the slightest, a curious gleam glinted in his eyes as he shifted to sidestep yet another blindly charging peasant.

This one brandished a broken chair with the force of a man long used to manual labor, but the improvised weapon served little against the stranger. His hand moved in a flash of silver and the imbecile fell down without another sound.

Damn, but it was boring.

The man felt as if he were swatting flies in a hot summer day. The level of effort involved did not differ by much. After the bandit hole - Thornridge, wasn't it? - he had kept walking south and the harsh conditions of the Brookmoor had given him hope for the kind of people who made their living in such a deadly place.

But it had turned out that the villagers did not live in the Brookmoor at all. They toiled and labored like sheep in a small terrain they had stolen whoever knew how long ago from the fetid swamp and they avoided its depths like the plague. They were just another handful of impaired weaklings! And to make matters worse, they were a bunch of proud weaklings.

The stranger snorted and shot out his free hand, palm flat, to shatter the nose of the owner of the alehouse. The little man's eyes rolled back in his head and he fell to the floor, dead.

All of them were dead. He was once more the one standing in a pool of blood, alone. Uncontested.

Damn the fuckers! He spat on the ground and sheathed his sword with more emphasis than needed. The screech of steel on steel helped to alleviate his frustration.

"What are you looking at?" he growled, not turning to look at the presence he had felt standing in a corner of the street turned battlefield from the beginning of the confrontation.

He heard a cackle, wild and untamed and dry as lightning, and turned towards the sound with a blank look.

"I make a point of never asking this, but I'll make an exception for the resident psycho. Who the fuck are you?"

"You are late, child," the woman replied with a devious look.

She was old, so old that her skin was translucent and her limbs seemed as frail as a bird's. And yet, when the man looked at her, he noted the piercing glare of her pale, pale blue eyes and the shrewd twist of her grin.

"I bet everyone else thinks I'm too early. A lifetime or so."

"Who cares about what they think? It does not matter! It will not make the truth any falser." She cackled again, with that glint in her gaze, and it gave the man pause.

"Do not give me that look, child," she added with a wink. "I know the truth and the truth is that Yashal is not blind."

If hearing his given name spilling out of her lips made him uncomfortable, he hid it well behind a snort.

"If you're trying to tell me something, you could get to the point. I have a bottle of booze waiting for me in the counter if these bastards have not wasted it."

"You are late, child. Yashal. Demon. Whichever your prefer. By the gods, you have more names than I have arthritis!"

Yashal smirked at the odd comparison. If it was true that the woman had arthritis, it did not make her any less dangerous. He could feel her, like a wolf who knew that another alpha male was near, and he was not fooled by the mad laughter or deteriorated body: this little wisp of a woman was stronger than the villagers he had killed.

"Good to have the conversation back on track. Late for what?"

"For the choice that must be made."

He arched an eyebrow and the little woman huffed.

"Do not make it worse! Go! You are not blind, child, I know. I know you saw her. Go to her, now!"

She was right, Yashal guessed. He had seen her. Out of the many faceless bodies who had thrown themselves at his blade, he had seen her wide eyes and a gut instinct - a curiosity he rarely felt piqued - had kept his gaze on her even as he dispatched more opponents.

But he did not take well to orders.

"Why would I?"

"Because you Should be there, recalcitrant child."

He sighed and stared back into the alehouse. The truth was that he was bored.

"Bah. This wretched idiots can't brew decent booze to save their hides anyway."

If they were able to, he'd not have made the comments that made them all jump him in a frenzy. The drink he had been served had tasted like an awful mixture of sweat and horse piss with a touch of rotten fish for good measure.

He hoped the girl would still be waiting for him because he did not feel like chasing her across the whole Brookmoor. She'd better be more interesting than the empty tavern, he thought, and started to follow her at a leisured pace.

Grandma Ulra laughed, her piercing blue eyes fixed on him even after he had disappeared behind the disorganized houses of Reed Shallows.

"Go, child. The choice awaits," she whispered before the strength left her limbs, voice and gaze.

o O o

Rhyl'lyn's head snapped up a few moments before the door to the cottage slammed open, letting through a panting, dishevelled Khalia and an onslaught of sun. His eyes watered and he felt his whole body tense, but this time the pain hit him with less viciousness and he could keep his wits.

"Something happened?"

Khalia exuded an intense feel of wrongness, of distress, but he did not move from the rickety chair he had claimed as his. Instead, he observed her shaking limbs and watery eyes, eyes that had seen what they were not ready for. Unfortunately, the list of what that something might be was long and he had to wait for her to regain her composure and answer his question.

She didn't.

"Hurry, help me!" She grabbed onto one end of the table he was sitting at and motioned for him to get up and grab the other one.

It was not in his nature, but he obeyed and noted that she was so beside herself that she even forgot to be amazed at the fact that today he could be moving, and shoving weight, even under indirect sun exposure.

"Something happened?" he asked again as a they settled the table out of the way.

Against the wall, in the vacated space, a wooden chest became visible and Khalia threw herself against it before offering a reply.

"These things belonged to my father," she explained once she had wrestled the lid open. "I still keep everything around: he had so little, it seemed wrong to throw it.

A pair of boots, a furred cloak and several wads of cloth that might have been clothes flew around the room but she kept digging. She had begun to ramble as well, Rhyl'lyn noted with amusement.

"I never thought I'd use any of this. I never learned how to! But now that man's here and…"

"What man?"

At last, Khalia seemed to find what she looked for. Her fingers clenched tight over a rancid old sheath, she sat back on her heels and swallowed until she calmed down enough.

"He was in the alehouse. I was just walking by, to buy more eggs from Maryoh, but then… there was a noise and a man fell almost on top of me. He was… dead. And then there was another man, and the stranger killed him right in front of me."

"Is that so extraordinary?"

He was no longer petrified at the thought of violence, he found. Khalia had told him the previous eve that war was commonplace, and after witnessing her reactions he found that he did not much care one way or the other. Man was as it was, selfish, foolish, untrustworthy. They were blind to the truth and so they did not hesitate to reach for what they wanted, when they wanted, it seemed.

More men were dead. What did it matter to him?

She did not seem to share his views, however.

"Of course it is extraordinary! It is wrong!" She wheeled on him, a short, curved blade clutched in her hands.

"How so? You told me there were many wars. Were wars not commonplace?"

"This is different!" She trusted the weapon to him, hilt first. "We have to help them and stop that murderer!"

He took the object, his right hand closing over the wooden hilt. It was not exactly a weapon. It was some kind of tool, used to butcher the carcasses of animals, and parts of the blade were covered in rust. But it could still kill. Rhyl'lyn knew that much just from touching it.

He looked up from the blade and into her anxious face.

"You have to stop him," she said. "I know you can, even without your magic. You're a fey and he's only a savage from outside the kingdom."

"Why?"

"Why…?"

"Did he attack you? Will he attack me? Why do I have to stop him?"

"No, he did not attack me but he killed _people_! Don't you understand? He's a monster! You must kill him!"

Rhyl'lyn turned the weapon over in his hand. He understood, better than she did. After exploiting the dokkar and damning them to oblivion and eternal darkness, Man found it convenient to rely on them once more. For Man, it seemed, the dark fey were no different from the tools they had gifted them in the dawn of time. Weapons to be used and discarded.

He narrowed his eyes. He had not escaped the Otherworld to fall prisoner to a lesser mortal race.

"I must, indeed, do something," he mused aloud.

He shifted his grip on the weapon, closing his blackened fingers over the hilt, feeling the old wood and the blunt edge and the blood that had once covered it. When he moved, he was swift like a flickering shadow - mortal eyes would not have been able to follow his hands. He was also as gentle as he could.

He lowered her to the ground, her stern self-righteous look masking her fear and slowly fading into peacefulness.

She didn't look surprised, but Rhyl'lyn knew that it was because she had had no time to comprehend what was happening. It had nothing to do with the inevitability of his actions.

Because she had not given him any other option. She knew who he was, what he was: she'd not have allowed him to go free. She had become his captor the moment she had rescued him and had tried to wield him for her own benefit.

There really had been no other option, he thought as he turned on his heel towards the door.

The damnable sun still shone bright and the villagers did not venture out to Khalia's hut but he knew she was the only healer in town and if someone was wounded her help might be required. He must be long gone before anyone chose to call on her or more jailors would present themselves.

Taking a deep breath and squinting his eyes, he stood and turned to the entrance.

"You've just ruined my fun, brat. You'd better make up for it."

He never saw the figure leaning against the doorjamb.

He never even felt his presence.


	8. The choice

A/N: _So I'm back, and we're finishing the first part of this thing! I'm sorry for the delay, I went off on holidays (which I used to work out the holes on the remaining plot, by the way) and when I returned I realized I had forgotten how to write fight scenes. They are back to being awfully difficult! But the dialogue wrote itself, so... Here it is, the chapter. Please, let me know what you think of it... and of the whole story! Thanks for your support,_

o O o

**8. The choice**

o O o

"Are you the murderer?"

The man scoffed and pointed behind Rhyl'lyn without moving from his relaxed stance, leaning against the door frame and blocking the only path to freedom.

"Nah, that would be you."

The reply was so casual that it threw him off balance. He had claimed not to care about the lives of Man, he had claimed to seek loneliness, but he was not ready to face the indifference of this newcomer. He could understand a nonchalant, stoic front because he created one himself, but the man did not fake the casualness of the situation. It unnerved him.

"What do you want?" He had to squint against the sunlight that kept framing the immobile silhouette of the man and once more cursed the unwelcome brilliance - it did not allow him to see enough of him, of his expression, of what he knew.

It did not matter. He'd have never read the answer he received in the other's indolent smile.

"I wanted some booze, but this shit-hole of a village has nothing to give. What they call ale? I'd use it to fight the plagues of rats in the local barns. If they bothered to build barns."

Rhyl'lyn had to blink.

It could not be the real answer. It was… absurd, to say the least.

The man must have seen an expression of incredulity fluttering in his eyes for he smiled, his teeth a white flash in the shadows of the doorway.

"The locals didn't like my advice, but that's not my fault. It's not my fault either if they thought challenging a foreigner was smart. The chick might have run off because of me, though." His smile widened into a wolfish grin. "I just came to check on her, and you ruined that."

"Did you know her?"

"Nah," the man answered while sparing a glance at Khalia's body. "I should have, though. I think. She looks good enough, compared with the old crows I've seen."

The immediate implication made Rhyl'lyn frown for no apparent reason and he shifted his grip on the old hunting knife.

"Do you intent to step aside and let me pass?"

"You ask an awful lot of questions."

And you don't ask nearly enough, Rhyl'lyn thought. But he kept his silence and levelled the man with a stare as best he could taking into account the sun.

The man laughed.

"Don't think I will, brat. You've ruined my evening and it's fair that I demand compensation. Besides, murder is punished by law and all that, and it'd not be nice to leave the chick unavenged. If you want out, you go through me."

In a way, Rhyl'lyn had expected the answer. No Man would let him go free, that much was clear. But when the words were spoken aloud, he felt a rush of anger filling his chest. Did this man think to challenge him? To win against him? He had lost his ability to make things and he could no longer Change the fool into a corpse, or the soil under his boots into a deadly pit, but he still had over a century of experience to serve him.

"I shall."

And he reversed his grip on the knife and charged.

The man was not unarmed. After hearing what Khalia had said, he had not expected him to be. But he did not expect the silvery blade to appear in his hand as if from thin air.

He threw himself to the side to avoid a downwards slash and his left hip jostled the table with a loud thump. The impact hurt both his body and his pride and he scrambled up again as fast as he could.

The man smirked at him, sword loosely held in his right hand as he waited for him to gather his wits and attack again. He seemed to be confident on his skills and on the longer reach of his weapon. Rhyl'lyn allowed himself a smile in turn: that reach would play against its wielder in close quarters, and the interior of the cabin was small and cluttered.

Once more, Rhyl'lyn charged. This time, he calculated and planned his movement: in two steps he set himself up for another slash, but when it came he didn't bolt. Instead, he stepped into the sword's arch and changed his knife from one hand to the other to find the unprotected side of his enemy. The movement was fast, just a blur of motion and a glint of rusted steel, too fast for mortal eyes to see and impossible to react to.

But the tip of the knife did not sink into the man's flesh.

It screeched, blade flicking against blade, and Rhyl'lyn's hand was wrenched aside with so much violence that he overcompensated and, for a long heartbeat, presented his own side in a clear opening. The flash of silver danced around his ribs and he felt a blow to the back of his leading knee that resounded with a crack and sent him tumbling to the floor.

Rhyl'lyn rolled with the fall and sprang up again favoring his injured knee. Shock fought to rise a hundred questions to the forefront, more so when he realized that he had been hit with the back of the blade, but he pushed them back with grim determination and focused on his opponent.

The man was now inside the hut, and his own tumble had sent him across the door. The sun beat against his back and he noted that he could turn and run.

He didn't.

He told himself that there was no point, that the man would follow and he could not afford to leave loose ends.

Taking a few steps back, Rhyl'lyn abandoned the doorway without taking his eyes off the man - with a knife, it'd have been suicide to try to hold the position against the swordman. He could not re-enter the cabin, just as he could not get out before. No matter: he had the sun on his back now and that was a fitting exchange for the hand-to-hand fighting.

But that bothersome smile never left the man's lips. It danced across his features even though Rhyl'lyn knew that the sun did not allow him to distinguish his expression, his intent, his next move. Even though he held the advantage, the man still smirked and walked towards him, a slow leisured pace.

And not making a single move to attack.

Rhyl'lyn could not wait him out forever. Sooner or later, the villagers would come along in their need for a healer and he must be far away by then.

He let the man come close enough, miming his calmness, and then lunged forward, dropping to a roll at the last moment to avoid the predictable riposte.

Only the riposte was not predictable. The blade followed his movement and the blow fell to his wrist, so hard that he was forced to drop the knife. He could have snatched it up with his other hand but the sword was there before the thought formed in his mind and the hunting knife went flying and spinning well out of his reach.

He tried to spring up, but his knee gave out when another blow, twin to the first, fell in exactly the same spot. Then, before he could touch the ground, another flash of silver pain exploded on his ribs and he pitched to the side.

When his head hit the ground, the clear blue sky above him and the razor-sharp point of the sword touching his throat, he had to allow some shock to slip through: three hits in the time it took a crouched man to fall.

Four, for the other would have had time to plunge the steel in his neck if he had so chosen.

He stared into the human's dark eyes, trying to hide the bewilderment that surely shone in his own, and was awarded a derisive snort and a raised eyebrow.

"You didn't really think that the second roll would work any better than the first, right?"

"Why?"

The man looked genuinely confused for a heartbeat and then gave Rhyl'lyn a look that said he didn't think very highly of his general intelligence.

"Because I'm a better swordman than you."

"I was not fighting with a sword." Even as he spoke, he realized the absurdity of his answer. He wished he could take it back, but the man just laughed.

"Good point. That thing was no better than a stick, but it doesn't change the fact."

"Fight me with a stick and we shall find out." His mouth was running without his brain, it seemed, but it didn't bother Rhyl'lyn as much as it should have. The prospect of an end had that effect, he guessed.

"Sticks don't kill, brat."

"I beg to disagree."

The image of Khalia hung in the air between them for a long, uncomfortable silence before the man shrugged it off.

"Suit yourself. That explains why you are so bad."

All of Rhyl'lyn's hackles raised at the insult - he had, after all, defied the gods themselves and had managed to escape an inexpugnable prison to reach the World, and he had fought every inch of the way. He wanted to scream that he was not bad, but a rational, detached part told him that he was pinned to the mud with a sword point at his neck, and that it must mean something.

He didn't want to go into what that something might be, so he focused on another why.

"You did not answer me. Why did you not kill me?"

"I was going to. But you sidetracked me."

"Going to answer, I assume?"

"Nah, going to kill you."

"And yet you did not."

"Because you don't shut up."

"You had plenty of chances before I started speaking. All of them would have ended my existence, but you chose to hit me with the back of your blade."

"Where would be the fun in killing you off so soon?"

"Were you playing with me?"

"Toying."

"What?"

"I was toying with you, not playing."

"Is there a difference?"

"Yeah."

"Which one?"

"I like my sentence better."

Rhyl'lyn had to laugh. It was not amusing, but the situation was so ridiculous, he was so out of his depth, that he had to laugh. It was a low, rasping sound as he tried to contain it, and the man above him arched a brow and snorted.

"You know, you were lousy, but this is still the best fight I've gotten in a while."

"The other contenders were that much worse?"

"Nah, they were that much more boring." The man pinched the bridge of his nose and withdrew his blade from Rhyl'lyn's neck, just a couple of inches but enough to let him breathe easier. "Listen, do you always talk like that?"

"Is there something wrong with my speech? I was not aware."

"It never ends, that's what's wrong. It's giving me the mother of all headaches." He smirked, but then his expression froze. He tilted his head a bit, cocked it to the side and narrowed his eyes.

Rhyl'lyn swallowed. He was not a fool. He knew the man was good enough that the few inches of breathing space would not matter: the slightly curved blade would fly and destroy him before he could register the movement if its wielder chose.

The sword didn't strike, though. Instead, the man guffawed. Shaking his head, he grinned widely, as if he had understood the joke of creation.

"That might be the ale, though," he said. "Look, brat, I don't know who you are or why you killed the chick, but you are the best quality entertainment around here. So, let's strike a deal: I'll spare you and you'll carry my luggage."

Rhyl'lyn pushed up to a sitting position, in spite of the blade, and stared up into the human's eyes. He didn't understand. He didn't understand this man, his nature or his motivations. He awaited destruction, or perhaps enslavement if the swordman thought to use him, but…

"I don't trust you."

"Your problem, not mine." The man shrugged, his knowing grin reaching his eyes. "You'll be expected to cook sometimes too, by the way."

"Servitude." But what kind of man would request such frivolous servitude from a fey?

"If you say so. Fun, I think."

"I fail to see how dragging your belongings and preparing your meals might be considered fun in any way."

"You're a pessimist by nature or it's just the swamp, bringing out the best in you?"

"By nature, I believe."

"I reckon you were not supposed to answer that," the man sighed. "Alright, let's see: you have talent, brat. You could be good. And as I said, this has been the best fight this damned kingdom has given me to date. Perhaps you can do better in a couple of years and give me a decent duel."

"You wish to spare my life in the hope that I shall claim yours in the future?"

"Nah. I do it for the entertainment between now and the next time I defeat you."

There was a moment of silence, the sun hanging low in the horizon and its rays slanting across the small clearing in front of Khalia's cottage.

It was no one's cottage now, Rhyl'lyn guessed as he scored the mud with his bare fingers. She would return to the land, to the mud she had lived in, and her soul would soar to wherever human souls were supposed to go. In time, her name would be forgotten. First, the ownership of her home would depart living memory. Then, the cabin itself would be lost to the swamp. There was nothing eternal. This man, too, would die and disappear.

He could wait. He had time. Perhaps it was even better to accept and learn as much as he could about this broken World.

"Sheathe your blade. I shall come with you."

The man nodded, something glinting in the depths of his eyes - something that was gone too fast for Rhyl'lyn to name, or even to acknowledge. The blade disappeared, as fast as it had come, and he held out a large, calloused hand to pull Rhyl'lyn to his feet.

"Good. Now that that choice is out of the way, how about we put some distance between this village and ourselves before crashing for the night?"

o O o

The delicate wine decanter fell from her limp fingers and shattered in a thousand fragments of colored glass. The growing puddle of dark red liquid lapped at the hem of her flowing dress and a few shards flew with enough violence to leave tiny, bleeding cuts on her feet, but she did not move. She just stared at the crimson that stained it all, that stained her, and at the once beautiful vase shattered beyond recognition, useless, impossible to mend…

"My lady! Are you alright?"

The words of her young attendant tore through her reverie and she crafted a brittle smile to reassure her. "All is well, fret not. I was clumsy."

"My lady is not clumsy at all!" The maiden knelt with a white cloth in her hands and started to try to soak the wine before the disaster grew too large and Iladruel had to smile at her ready defense.

Grabbing her own kerchief, she gathered her skirts and bent to help, mindful of the sharp glass splinters that were strewn around her feet. The embroidered white silk soon turned ruby red, but the decanter had been full and the liquid kept covering the floor inch by inch.

"I shall fetch more cloths at once, my lady. Please, do not soil yourself with these tasks and leave it to me," the attendant said when her own cloth was soaked and she realized her lady's dress was not escaping unscathed.

"Yes, and do bring a bucket as well," she replied absently, her eyes lost in the red mess.

The young fey sketched a curtsey and ran from the room, but Iladruel paid her no heed. She looked at her wine-stained kerchief, her wine-splattered dress, her wine-dripping hands. Red, ruby red, crimson red. Blood red.

The truth was that the servant was correct: she was not clumsy. She walked with a graceful glide and her fingers danced over the most delicate ornaments, and it might prove a challenge to find one more graceful even among the immortal fey. And yet the decanter had slipped, as if it was meant to do so, and everything had been bathed in unstoppable red.

What if it was not wine?

What if it was blood?

Her mind filled with thoughts of courtly, loyal Sahin and her eyes saw his guarded eyes and resigned smile when she had told him about her last dream. She could never forget that smile, that soft quirk of the lips he reserved for their private meetings away from the rest of the council. She had always relished it, because it meant she had won their little game, she had won him over and convinced him to act according to her advice, her visions.

He had smiled that smile when he told her he was leaving. He had not wanted to go, Iladruel knew that, but he had gone for her.

And now, a sudden feeling of dread gripped the pit of her stomach and strangled her breath as she dropped the kerchief. Because there was blood flowing like a river, and the her visions offered her no solace and no clarity as to whose it was.

She sprung to her feet and took several steps back, and a shard of glass crunched under her heel, piercing her soft slipper and making her own blood drip from the cut and mingle with the wine in the ever-growing puddle. She didn't flinch and didn't stop to acknowledge the pain.

She didn't even answer the concerned questions of her attendant when she passed her in the corridor.

She just ran. She ran, and tried to understand what had changed, what the hanging vacuum and the terrifying silence that suddenly pressed in from all sides meant.

She didn't find an answer. The gods remained silent. She saw nothing but a small, resigned smile and a shattered bottle.

o O o

**To Be Continued...**

o O o


End file.
